
Crime against Ireland 



and 



How the War may 
right it 

By Sir Roger Casement. 



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fe p A <\ (c a 

Book_ .d>3 



The 
Crime against Ireland 

and :, : 

How the War may 
right it. 

By Sir Roger Casement. 



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Ireland, Germany and Freedom of the Seas. 

To Free the Seas, Free Ireland. 

The following- articles were begun in 191 i under the 
title, "'Ireland, Germany and the Next War," and were 
intended for private circulation only among a few inter- 
ested friends of both countries. 

Part I was written in August, 1 9 1 1 , Parts II to VI 
were written at odd moments, between the end of 191 2 
and November 1 9 1 3 ; Part VII in December 1 9 1 3 . Part VII 
under the title of "The Elsewhere Empire ' ' was published 
in January 19 14 in a Dublin monthly review. 

The whole seven parts furnish in outline the case for 
a German-Irish alliance as this presented itself to the 
writer's mind when the world was still at peace; and in 
Part VII the intrigues of Great Britain to induce an anti- 
German policy on the part of the United States are 
touched on. 

It was the writer's intention to show in succeeding 
chapters how the vital needs of European peace, of Eu- 
ropean freedom of the seas and oflrish National life and 
prosperity were indissolubly linked with the cause . of 
Germany in the struggle so clearly impending between 
that country and Great Britain. 

The war has come sooner than was expected. The rest 
of the writer's task must be essayed not with the author's 
pen, but with the rifle of the Irish Volunteer. As a con- 
tribution to the cause of Irish freedom this presentment 
of the case for Germany, friend of Ireland and foe of 
England, is now published. 

It was written on the assumption that a war between 
Germany and Great Britain might be localized between 
those two Powers alone. 



4 

Obviously this was unlikely ; but for the purpose of 
stating the ease of Ireland more clearly the conflict was 
limited, in this outline, to the two great antagonists — 
England lighting, to retain the mastery of the seas and 
keep all Europe pent up in an armed camp, Germany 
fighting for freedom of the seas and to break through the 
forest of bayonets British policy has created as the surest 
guarantee against her own dominion of the ocean being 
successfully challenged . 

Once the chief factor governing the conflict is perceived, 
namely, the British elaim to own the seas and to dominate 
the commercial intercourse of the world, then the cause 
of Germany becomes the cause of European civilization 
at large. Germany is fighting the battle of Europe, 
the battle of free trade, the fight to open the seas of the 
world. 

A German triumph will bring equality of opportunity 
to all who traverse the seas, and in order to safeguard 
that new- won freedom Ireland, the Keeper of the Seas 
for Great Britain must become the Keeper of the Seas 
for Europe. Such is the object of the German effort: such 
the possibility and hope to Ireland and the sea nations 
of a German triumph. A German victory must bring, as 
one of the surest guarantees of future peace and sea 
liberty for all an Ireland restored to Europe and erected 
into a sovereign Fluropean State under international gua- 
rantees. 

England fights as the foe of Europe and the enemy of 
European civilization. In order to destroy German ship- 
ping, German commerce, German industry, she has deliber- 
ately plotted the conspiracy we now see at work. The 
war of 1 9 1 4 is England's war. 

For years she has been planning how she could, without 
danger to herself, destroy the peaceful menace of German 
prosperity. 



A few more years of peaceful expansion by Germany 
and the chances of success would be less if not quite gone. 
Since August, 191 i, the sole object of British foreign 
policy has been to put Germany in a false position and 
to arrange for the blow to be struck by other hands — by 
hired hands. 

To-day we see the triumph of British diplomacy. Russia 
and France have been nerved up to the task. The sword 
has been drawn against Germany, and England, confident 
now that come what may she must gain her object (the 
destruction of German sea power, shipping and commerce), 
enters joyfully into a struggle that while it shall never 
touch her own shores, or interrupt or lessen a single 
English meal, must end in the laying waste of Germany 
and the annihilation of the only European people who 
had shown themselves capable of serious competition in 
the peaceful arts of commerce and industry. 

In order to achieve this crime England is prepared to 
hand Europe over to Russia. Herself a non-European 
Power she cheerfully contemplates Europe dominated by 
an Asiatic Power, so that she may sweep German com- 
merce from the seas and destroy the constant threat of 
German peaceful expansion. No greater crime against 
civilization has ever been planned. Secure herself, as she 
believes, guarded by the seas and her "invicible" ring 
of Dreadnoughts, having never experienced the hor- 
rors of invasion or herself borne the suffering of war 
she has plotted and achieved a war of inconceivable 
horror and devastation abroad, from which she confidently 
hopes to pull the spoils of a ruined German world commerce. 

In this war Germany fights not only for her own life 
— she fights to free the sees and if she wins she fights 
to free Ireland. In this war Ireland has only one enemy. 
Let every Irish heart, let every Irish hand, let every Irish 
purse be with Germany. 



Let Irishmen in America get ready. The day a German 
sea victory tolls the death knell of British tyranny at sea, 
it tolls the death knell of British rule in Ireland. 

Let Irishmen in America stand ready, armed, keen and 
alert. The German guns that sound the sinking of the 
British Dreadnoughts will be the call of Ireland to her 
scattered sons. 

The tight may be fought on the seas but the fate will 
be settled on an island. The crippling of the British fleet 
will mean a joint German-Irish invasion of Ireland and 
every Irishman able to join that army of deliverance 
must get ready to-day. 

New York City, I. September 19 14. 



Part I. 

(Written in August, 191 1.) 

As long- ago as 1870 an Irishman pointed out that if 
the English press did not abandon the campaign of pre- 
judiced suspicion it was even then conducting against 
Germany, the time for an understanding between Great 
Britain and the German people would be gone for ever. 

It was Charles Lever who delivered this shrewd ap- 
preciation of the onlooker. 

Writing from Trieste on August 29. 1870. to John 
Blackwood, he stated: 

'*Be assured the Standard is making a great blunder by 
its anti-Germanism, and English opinion has just now a 
value in Germany which if the nation be once disgusted 
with us will be gone for ever." 

Lever preserved enough of the Irishman through all 
his official connection to see the two sides of a question 
and appreciate the point of view of the other man. 

What Lever pointed out during the early stages of the 
Franco-German War has come to pass. The Standard of 
forty years ago is the British press of to-day. with here 
and there the weak voice of an impotent Liberalism cry- 
ing in the wilderness. Germany has, indeed, become 
thoroughly disgusted and the hour of reconciliation has 
long since gone by. In Lever's time it was now or never; 
the chance not taken then would be lost for ever, and 
the English publicist of to-day is not in doubt that it is 
now too late. His heart searchings need another formula 
of expression — no longer a conditional assertion of doubt, 
but a positive questioning of impending fact. "'Is it too 
soon?" That the growing German navy must be smashed 
he is convinced, but how and when to do it are not so clear. 

The situation ist not yet quite intolerable, and so, al- 
though many urge an immediate attack before the enemy 



grows too strong, the old-time British love of compromise 
and trust in luck still holds his hand. The American 
"alliance, " too, may yet come off. The entente with France, 
already of great value, can be developed into something 
more assuredly anti-German, and if present day relations 
of friendship with the United States can be but tightened 
into a mutual committal of both Powers to a common 
foreign policy, then the raid on Germany may never be 
needed. She can be bottled up without it. No man who 
studies the British mind can have any doubt of the fixed 
trend of British thought. 

It can be summed up in one phrase. German expansion 
is not to be tolerated. It can only be a threat to or at- 
tained at the expense of British interests. Those interests 
being world-wide, with the seas for their raiment — nay, 
with the earth for their footstool — it follows that wherever 
Germany may turn for an outlet she is met by the British 
challenge: "Not There!" British interests interdict the 
Old World ; the Monroe Doctrine, maintained, it is alleged 
by British naval supremacy, forbids the New. 

Let Germany acquire a coaling station, a sanitorium. 
a health resort, the ground for a hotel even, on some 
foreign shore and "British interests'" spring to attention, 
English jealousy is aroused. How long this state of tension 
can last without snapping could, perhaps, be best an- 
swered in the German naval yards. It is evident that some 
70,000,000 of the best educated race in the world, phy- 
sically strong, mentally stronger, homogenous, highly 
t rained, highly skilled, capable and energetic and obedient 
to a discipline that rests upon and is moulded by a lofty 
conception of patriotism, cannot permanently be coirhned 
to a strictly limited area by a less numerous race, less 
well educated, less strong mentally and physically, and 
assuredly less well trained, skilled and disciplined. Stated 
thus the problem admits of a simple answer ; and were 



there no other factor governing the situation, that answer 
would have been long since given. 

It is not the ethnical superiority of the English race 
1 hat accounts for their lead, but the favorable geographical 
situation from which they have been able to develop and 
direct their policy of expansion. 

England has triumphed mainly from her position. The 
qualities of her people have, undoubtely, counted for 
much, but her unrivalled position in the lap of the Atlantic, 
barring the seaways and closing the tideways of Central 
and North-Eastern Europe, has counted for more. 

With this key she has opened the world to herself and 
closed it to her rivals. 

The long war with France ended in the enhancement 
of this position by the destruction of the only rival fleet 
in being. 

Europe, without navies, without shipping became for 
England a mere westward projection of Asia, dominated 
by warlike peoples who could always be set by the ears 
and made to fight upon points of dynastic honor, while 
England appropriated the markets of mankind. Thence- 
forth, for the best part of a century, while Europe was 
spent in what, to the superior Briton were tribal conflicts, 
the seas and coasts of the world lay open to the intrusions 
of his commerce, his colonists, his finance, until there 
was seemingly nothing left outside the two Americas 
worth laying hands on. This highly favored maritime 
position depends, ho\v T ever, upon an unnamed factor, the 
unchallenged possession and use of which by England 
has been the true foundation of her imperial greatness. 
Without Ireland there would be to-day no British Empire. 
The vital importance of Ireland to England is understood, 
but never proclaimed by every British statesman. To sub- 
due that western and ocean-closing island and to exploit 
its resources, its people and, above all, its position, to 



IO 

the sole advantage of the eastern island has been the set 
aim of every English government from the days of 
Henry VIII onwards. The vital importance of Ireland to 
Europe is not and has not been understood by any Euro- 
pean statesman. To them it has not been a European 
island, a vital and necessary element of European develop- 
ment, but an appanage of England, an island beyond an 
island, a mere geographical expression in the titles of the 
conqueror. Louis XIV came nearest, perhaps, of European 
rulers to realizing its importance in the conflict of European 
interests when he sought to establish James II on its 
throne as rival to the monarch of (Treat-Britain and 
counterpoise to the British sovereignty in the western 
seas. Montesquieu alone of French writers grasped the 
importance of Ireland in the international affairs of his 
time, and lie blames the vacillation of Louis, who failed 
to put forth his strength, to establish James upon the 
throne of Ireland and thus by a successful act of perpetual 
separation to "affaiblir le voisin." Napoleon, too late, 
in St. Helena realized his error: "Had I gone to Ireland 
instead of to Egypt, the empire of England was at an end." 

With these two utterances of the French writer and 
of the French ruler we begin and end the reference of 
Ireland to European affairs which Continental statecraft 
has up to this emitted, and so far has failed to apply. 

To-day there is probably no European thinker (although 
Germany produced one in recent times), who. when he 
faces the overpowering supremacy of Great Britain's in- 
fluence in world affairs and the relative subordination of 
European rights to the asserted interests of that small 
island, gives a thought to the other and smaller island 
beyond its shores. And yet the key to British supremacy 
lies there. Perhaps the one latter day European who 
perceived the true relation of Ireland to Great Britain 
was Neibuhr. 



I I 

'•Should England." he said, "not change her conduct, 
Ireland may still for a long period belong to her, but not 
always; nnd the loss of that country is the death day. 
not only to her greatness, but of her very existence." 

I propose to point out as briefly as may be possible in 
dealing with so unexpected a proposition, that the res- 
toration of Ireland to European life lies at the bottom of 
all successful European effort to break the bonds that 
now shackle every Continental people that would assert 
itself and extend its ideals, as opposed to British interests. 
outside the limits of Europe. 

It may be well first to define "British interests" and 
to show that these are not necessarily synonymous with 
European interests. 

British interests are: first, the control of all the seas 
of all the world — in full military and commercial control. 
If this be not challenged peace is permitted; to dispute 
it seriously means war. 

Next in order of British interests stands the right of 
pre-emption to all healthy, fertile, "unoccupied" lands 
of the globe not already in possession of a people capable 
of seriously disputing invasion, with the right of reversion 
to such other regions as may, from time to time prove 
commercially desirable or financially exploitable, whether 
suitable for British colonization or not. 

In a word British interests assume that the future of 
the world shall be an English-speaking future. It is clear 
that sooner or later the British colonies, so-called, must 
develop into separate nationalities, and that the link of a 
common crown cannot bind them for ever. But, as Sir 
Wilfrid Laurier said at the recent imperial conference. 
"we bring you British institutions"" — English language, 
English law. English trade, English supremacy, in a 
word -this is the ideal reserved for mankind and summed 
up in the words "British interests."" 



I 2 

Turn where you will these interests are in effective 
occupation, and whether it be Madeira, Teneriffe, Agadir, 
Tahiti, Bagdad, the unseen Hag is more potent to exclude 
the non-British intruder than the visible standard of the 
occupying tenant. England is the landlord of civilization, 
mankind her tenantry, and the earth her estate. If this 
be not a highly exaggerated definition of British interests, 
ami in truth it is but a strongly colored chart of the broad 
outline of the design, then it is clear that Europe has a 
very serious problem to face if European civilization and 
ideals, as differing from the British type, are to find a 
place for their ultimate expansion in any region favored 
by the sun. 

The actual conflict of European interests in Morocco is 
a fair illustration of English methods. 1 

In the past France was the great antagonist, but since 
she is to-day no longer able to seriously dispute the British 
usufruct of the overseas world she is used (and rewarded) 
in the struggle now maintained t<> exclude Germany at 
all costs from the arena. Were France still dangerous 
she would never have been allowed to go to Algeciras, 
or from Algeciras to Fez. She has uses, however, in the 
anti-German prize ring and so Morocco is the price of her 
hire. That Germany should presume to inspect the trans- 
action or claim a share in the settlement has filled the 
British mind with profound indignation, the echoes of 
which are heard rumbling round the world from the 
Guildhall to Gaboon and from the Congo to Tahiti. The 
mere press rumor that France might barter Tahiti for 
German goodwill filled the British newspaper world with 
supermundane wrath. That France should presume to 
offer or (iermany to accept a French Pacific island in part 
discharge of the liabilities contracted at Algeciras was a 



This was written in August, 191 1. 



threat to British interests. Tahiti in the hands of a decadent 
republic, the greatest if you will but still one of the dying- 
nations, is a tiling to be borne with, but Tahiti possibly 
in the hands of Germany becomes at once a challenge 
and a threat. 

And so we learn that "Australasia protests" to the 
Home Government at the mere rumor that France may 
chose to part with one of her possessions to win German 
good will in Morocco. Neither France nor Germany can 
be permitted to be a free agent in a transaction that how- 
ever regarded as essential to their own interests might 
affect, even by a shadow on the sea, the world orbit of 
British interests. These interests it will be noted have 
reached such a stage of development as to require that 
all foreign States that cannot be used as tools, or regarded 
as agencies, must be treated as enemies. Germany with 
her growing population, her advancing industries, her 
keen commercial ability, and her ever expanding navy 
has become the enemy of civilization. Far too strong to 
be openly assailed on land she must at all costs be pent 
up in Central Europe and by a ring-fence of armed under- 
standings prohibited from a wider growth that would 
certainly introduce a rival factor to those British institu- 
tions and that world language that are seriously if not 
piously meditated as the ordained future for mankind. 

For English mentality is such that whatever England 
does is divinely ordained, and whether she stamps out a 
nation or merely sinks a ship the hymn of action is 
"Nearer. My God. to Thee". In a recent deputation to 
Kin"- Geors-e Y it will be remembered that certain British 
religious bodies congratulated that monarch on the third 
centenary of the translation into English of the Bible. 

Both the addresses of the subjects, eminent, religious 
and cultured men. and the sovereign's reply were highly 
informative of the mental attitude of this extraordinary 



people. The Bible it appeared was the "greatest posses- 
sion of the English race'". -'The British Bible"" was the 
first and greatest of British investments and upon the 
mora] dividends derived from its possession was founded 
the imperial greatness of this Island Empire. That other 
peoples possessed the Bible and had even translated it 
before England was not so much as hinted at. That tin- 
Bible was Greek and Hebrew in origin was never whis- 
pered. It began and ended with the English Authorized 
Version. The British Bible was the Bible that counted. 
It was the Bible upon which the sun never sets, the Bible 
that had blown Indian mutineers from its muzzle in the 
'fifties and was prepared to-day to have a shot at any 
other mutineers, Teuton or Turk, who dared to dispute 
its claim that the meek shall inherit the earth. The unc- 
tuous rectitude that converts the word of God into wad- 
ding for a gun is certainly a formidable opponent, as 
Cromwell proved. To challenge English supremacy be- 
comes not merely a threat to peace, it is an act of sacri- 
lege. And yet this worldwide Empire broad based upon 
the British Bible and the English navy, and maintained 
by ;i very inflexible interpretation of the one and a very 
skillful handling of the other, rests upon a sunk founda- 
tion that, is older than both and will surely bring both 
to final shipwreck. 

The British Empire is founded not upon the British 
Bible or the British Dreadnought, but upon Ireland. The 
Empire that began upon an island, ravaged, sacked and 
plundered shall end on an island, ''which whether it pro- 
ceed from the very genius of the soil, or the influence of 
the stars, or that Almighty God hath not yet appointed 
the time of her reformation, or that He reserveth her in 
this unquiet state still for some secret scourge which shall 
by her come unto England, it is hard to be known but 
yet much to be feared." Thus Edmund Spenser 340 years 



i5 

ago, whose Muse 1 drew profit from an Irish estate (one of 
the fruits of empire) and w T ho being a poet had imagina- 
tion to perceive that a day of payment must some day be 
called and that the first robbed might be the first to re- 
pay. The Empire founded in Ireland by Henry and Eli- 
zabeth Tudor has expanded into mighty things. England 
deprived of Ireland resumes her natural proportions those 
of a powerful kingdom. Still possessing Ireland she is 
always an empire. For just as Great Britain bars the 
gateways of northern and west central Europe, to hold 
up at will the trade and block the ports of every coast 
from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay, so Ireland stands 
between Britain and the greater seas of the west and 
blocks for her the highways of the ocean. An Ireland 
strong, independent and self-contained, a member of the 
European family of nations, restored to her kindred, 
would be the surest guarantee for the healthy develop- 
ment of European interests in those regions whence they 
are to-day excluded by the anti-European policy of Eng- 
land. 

The relation of Ireland to Great Britain has been in no 
wise understood on the Continent. The policy of England 
has been for centuries to conceal the true source of her 
supplies and to prevent an audit of her transactions with 
the remoter island. As long ago as the reign of Elizabeth 
Tudor this shutting off of Ireland from contact with Eu- 
rope was a settled point of English policy. The three 
"German Earls'* with letters from the Queen who visited 
Dublin in 1572 were prevented by the Lord Deputy from 
seeing for themselves anything beyond the walls of the 
city. 1 



1 This time-honored British precept — that foreigners should nut 
see for themselves the workings of English rule in Ireland — finds 
frequent expression in the Irish State Papers. In a letter from 
Dublin Castle of August 1572. from the Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam 



i6 

To represent the island as a poverty stricken land in- 
habited by a turbulent and ignorant race whom she has 
with unrewarded solicitude sought to civilize, uplift and 
educate has been a staple of England's diplomatic trade 
since modern diplomacy began. To compel the trade of 
Ireland to be with herself alone; to cut off all direct com- 
munication between Europe and this second of European 
islands until no channel remained save only through 
Britain; to enforce the most abject political and economic 
servitude one people ever imposed upon another; to ex- 
ploit all Irish resources, lands, ports, people, wealth, even 
her religion, everything in fine that Ireland held, to the 
sole profit and advancement of England, and to keep all 
the books and rigorously refuse an audit of the trans- 
action has been the secret but determined policy of Eng- 
land. 

We have read lately something of Mexican peonage; 
of how a people can be reduced to a lawless slavery, their 
land expropriated, their bodies enslaved, their labor ap- 
propriated, and how the nexus of this fraudulent con- 
nection lies in a falsified account. The hacendado holds 
the peon by a debt bondage. His palace in Mexico city, 
or on the sisal plains of Yucatan is reared on the stolen 
labor of a people whose bondage is based on a lie. The 
hacendado keeps the books and debits the slave with the 
cost of the lash that scourges him into the fields. Ireland 
is the English peon, the great peon of the British Empire. 
The books and the palaces are in London, but the wealth 
has come from the peons on the Irish Estate. The armies 
that overthrew Napoleon; the fleets that swept the navies 



to Burghley, Elizabeth's chief Minister, we are told that the " three 
German Earls" with "their conductor," Mr. Rogers, have arrived. 
The Viceroy adds, as his successors have done up to the present 
day: "According to your Lordship's direction they shall travell as 
litle wave into the cuntrev as I can." 



17 

of France and Spain from the seas were recruited from 
this slave pen of English civilization. During the last 
ioo years probably 2,000,000 Irishmen have been drafted 
into the English fleets and armies from a land purposely 
drained of its food. Fully the same number, driven by 
Executive-controlled famines have given cheap labor to 
England and have built up her great industries, manned 
her shipping, dug her mines, and built her ports and rail- 
ways while Irish harbors silted up and Irish factories 
closed down. While England grew fat on the crops and 
beef of Ireland, Ireland starved in her own green fields 
and Irishmen grew lean in the strife of Empire. 

While a million Irishmen died of hunger on the most 
fertile plains of Europe, English Imperialism drew over 
one thousand million pounds sterling for investment in a 
world policy from an island that was represented to that 
world as too poor to even bury its dead. The profit to 
England from Irish peonage cannot be assessed in terms 
of trade, or finance, or taxation. It far transcends Lord 
MacDonnell's recent estimate at Belfast of £ 3 2 0,000,000 — 
"an Empire's ransom," as he bluntly put it. 

Not an Empire's ransom but the sum of an Empire's 
achievement, the cost of an Empire's founding, and to-day, 
the chief bond of an Empire's existence. Detach Ireland 
from the map of the British Empire and restore it to the 
map of Europe and that day England resumes her native 
proportions and Europe assumes its rightful stature in the 
empire of the world. Ireland can only be restored to the 
current of European life, from which she has for so long 
been purposely withheld by the act of Europe. What 
Xapo eon perceived too late may yet be the purpose and 
achievement of a congress of nations. Ireland, I submit, 
is necessary to Europe, is essential to Europe, to-day she 
is retained against Europe, by a combination of elements 
hostile to Europe and opposed to European influence in 



the world. Her strategic importance is a factor of supreme 
weight to Europe and is to-day used in the scales against 
Europe. Ireland is appropriated and used, not to the ser- 
vice of European interests but to the extension of anti- 
European interests. The arbitrlum mundi claimed and most 
certainly exercised by England is maintained by the Bri- 
tish fleet, and until that power is effectively challenged 
and held in check it is idle to talk of European influence 
outside of certain narrow Continental limits. 

The power of the British fleet can never be permanent- 
ly restrained until Ireland is restored to Europe. Germany 
has of necessity become the champion of European inter- 
ests as opposed to the world dominion of England and 
English-speaking elements. She is to-day a dam, ;i great 
reservoir rapidly tilling with human life that must some 
day find an outlet. England instead of wisely digging 
channels for the overflow has hardened her heart, like 
Pharaoh, and thinks to prevent it or to so divert the 
stream that it shall be lost and drunk up in the thirsty 
sands of an ever expanding Anglo-Saxondom. German 
laws, German language, German civilization are to find 
no ground for replenishing, no soil to fertilize and make 
rich . 

I believe this to be not only the set policy of England, 
but to be based on the temperamental foundations of the 
English character itself, from which that people could not, 
e ven if they would, depart. The lists are set. The English 
mind, the English consciousness are such, that to oppose 
German influence in the world is to this people a neces- 
sity. They oppose by instinct, against argument, in the 
face of reason, they will do it blindly come what may 
and at all costs, and they will do it to the end. 

Their reasoning, if reason exists in what is after ail a 
matter of primal instinct, might find expression some- 
what as follows: 



19 

''German influence cannot but be hostile to British 
interests. The two peoples are too much alike. The 
qualities that have made England great they possess in 
a still greater degree. Given a fair field and no favor 
they are bound to beat us. They will beat us out of 
every market in the world, and we shall be reduced ulti- 
mately to a position like that of France to-day. Better 
fight while we are still the stronger. Better hinder now 
ere it be too late. We have bottled up before and de- 
stroyed our adversaries by delay, by money, by alliances. 
To tolerate a German rivalry is to found a German empire 
and to destroy our own." 

Some such obscure argument as this controls the Eng- 
lishman's reasoning when he faces the growing magni- 
tude of the Teutonic people. A bitter resentment, with 
fear at the bottom, a hurried clanging of bolt and rivet 
in the belt of new warships and a muffled but most dili- 
gent hammering at the rivets of an ever building Ameri- 
can Alliance — the real Dreadnought this, whose keel was 
laid sixteen years ago and whose slow, secret construc- 
tion has cost the silent swallowing of many a cherished 
British boast. 

English Liberalism might desire a different sort of 
reckoning with Germany, but English Liberalism is itself 
a product of the English temperament and however it 
may sigh, by individuals, for a better understandig be- 
tween the two peoples, in the mass, it is a part of the 
national purpose and a phase of the national mind and 
is driven relentlessly to the rivets and the hammering, 
the "Dreadnoughts" in being and that mightier Dread- 
nought yet to be, the Anglo-Saxon Alliance. Germany 
must fight if she is to get out. 

Doubtless she has already a naval policy and the plans 
for a naval war, for the fight will be settled on the sea, 
but the fate will be determined on an island. 



20 

The Empire that has grown from an island and spread 
with the winds and the waves to the uttermost shores 
will fight and be fought for on the water and will be 
ended where it began, on an island. 

That island, I believe, will be Ireland and not Great 
Britain. 



2 I 

Part II. 

(Written in September, 191 2.) 

A conflict between England and Germany exists already, 
a conflict of aims. 

England rich, prosperous, with all that she can possibly 
assimilate already in her hands, desires peace on present 
conditions of world power. Those conditions are not 
merely that her actual possessions should remain intact, 
but that no other Great Power shall, by acquiring colonies 
and spreading its people and institutions into neighboring- 
regions, thereby possibly affect the fuller development, 
of those pre-existing British States. For, with England 
equality is an offense and the Power that arrives at a 
degree of success approximating to her own and one 
capable of being expanded into conditions of fair rivalry 
has already committed the unpardonable sin. As Curran 
put it in his defense of Hamilton Rowan in 1797, "Eng- 
land is marked by a natural avarice of freedom which 
she is studious to engross and accumulate, but most un- 
willing to impart: whether from any necessity of her 
policy or from her weakness, or from her pride, 1 will not 
presume to say." 

Thus while England might even be the attacking party, 
and in all probability, will be the attacking party, she 
will embark on a war with Germany at an initial disad- 
vantage. She will be on her defense. Although, probably, 
the military aggressor from reasons of strategy, she will 
be acting in obedience to an economic policy of defense 
and not of attack. Her chief concern will be not to ad- 
vance and seize, always in war the more inspiring task, 
but to retain and hold. At best she could come out of 
the war with no new gain, with nothing added worth 
having to what she held on entering it. Victory would 
mean for her only that she had secured a further spell of 



22 

quiet in which to consolidate her strength and enjoy the 
good things already won. 

Germany will fight with far other purpose and one 
that must inspire a far more vigorous effort. She will 
fight, not merely to keep what she already has. but to 
escape from an intolerable position of inferiority she 
knows to be unmerited, and enforced not by the moral 
or intellectual superiority of her adversary or due to her 
own shortcomings, but maintained by reason of that ad- 
versary's geographical position and early seizure of the 
various points of advantage. 

Her effort will be not merely military, it will be an in- 
tellectual assertion, a fight in very truth for that larger free- 
dom, that citizenship of the world England is studious 
"to engross and accumulate " for herself alone and to deny 
to all others. Thus, while English attack at the best will 
be actuated by no loftier feeling than that of a man who, 
dwelling in a very comfortable house with an agreeable 
prospect, resists an encroachment on his outlook from the 
building operations of his less well-lodged neighbor, Ger- 
many will be fighting not only to get out of doors into 
the open air and sunshine, but to build a loftier and larger 
dwelling, fit tenement for a numerous and growing off- 
spring. 

Whatever the structure Germany seeks to erect England 
objects to the plan and hangs out her war sign i; Ancient 
Lights." 

Who can doubt that the greater patriotism and stronger 
purpose must inspire the man who fights for light, air 
and freedom, the right to walk abroad, to learn, to teach, 
aye, and to inspire others, rather than him whose chief 
concern it is to see that no one but himself enjoys those 
opportunities. The means, moreover, that each combatant 
will bring to the conflict are, in the end. on the side of 



23 

Germany. Much the same disproportion of resources exists 
as lay between Rome and Carthage. 

England relies on money, Germany on men. And just 
as Roman men beat Carthagian mercenaries, so must Ger- 
man manhood, in the end, triumph over British finance. 
Just as Carthage in the hours of final shock, placing her 
gold where Romans put their gods, and never with a 
soul above her ships, fell before the people of United Italy, 
so shall the mightier Carthage of the North Seas, in spite 
of trade, shipping, colonies, the power of the purse and 
the hired valor of the foreigner (Irish. Indian, African), 
go down before the men of United Germany. 

But if the military triumph of Germany seems thus 
likely, the ultimate assurance, nay even the ultimate sa- 
fety of German civilization can only be secured by a 
statesmanship which shall not repeat the mistake of 
Louis XI Y and Napoleon. The military defeat of England 
by Germany is a wholly possible achievement of arms, 
if the conflict be between these two alone, but to realize the 
economic and political fruits of that victory, Ireland must 
be detached from the British Empire. To leave a defeated 
England still in the full possession of Ireland would be, 
not to settle the question of German equal rights at sea 
or in world affairs, but merely to postpone the settlement 
to a second and possibly far greater encounter. It would 
be somewhat as if Rome, after the first Punic War had 
left Sicily still to Carthage. But Ireland is far more vital 
to England than Sicily was to Carthage, and is of far 
more account to the future of Europe on the ocean than 
the possession of Sicily was to the future of the Mediter- 
ranean. 

If Germany is to permanently profit from a victory 
over England, she must free the narrow seas, not only 
by the defeat of British fleets in being, but by ensuring 
that those seas shall not again be closed by British fleets 



2 4 

yet to be. The German gateway to a free Atlantic can 
only be kept open through a free Ireland. For just as the 
English Channel under the existing arrangement, where- 
by Ireland lies hidden from the rest of Europe, can be 
closed at will by England, so with Ireland no longer tied 
to the girdle of England, that channel cannot be locked. 
The key to the freedom of European navigation lies at 
Berehaven and not at Dover. With Berehaven won from 
English hands, England might close the Channel in truth, 
but Ireland could shut the Atlantic. As Richard Cox put 
it in 1689, quaintly but truly, in his dedication to King 
William III and Queen Mary of his "History of Ireland 
from the Earliest Times": 

"But no cost can be too great where the prize is of 
such value, and whoever considers the situation, ports, 
plenty, and other advantages of Ireland will confess that 
it must be retained at what rate soever; because if it 
should come into an enemy's hands, England would find 
it impossible to flowrish and perhaps difficult to subsist 
without it. To demonstrate this assertion it is enough to 
say that Ireland lies in the Line of Trade and that all the 
English vessels that sail to the East, West and South 
must, as it were, run the gauntlet between the Harbors 
of Brest and Baltimore ; and I might add that the Irish 
Wool being transported would soon ruin the English 
Clothing Manufacture. Hence it is that all Your Majesty's 
Predecessors have kept close to this fundamental Maxim 
of retaining Ireland inseparably united to the Crown of 
England." 

The sole and exclusive appropriation of Ireland and of 
all her resources has indeed formed, since the Recorder of 
Kinsale wrote, the mainstay and chief support of British 
greatness. 

The natural position of Ireland lying "in the line of 
trade," was possibly its chief value, but that "Irish wool." 



25 

which was by no means to be allowed free access to world 
markets typifies much else that Ireland has been relent- 
lessly forced to contribute to her neighbor's growth and 
sole profit. 

I read but yesterday — "Few people realize that the 
trade of Ireland with Great Britain is equal to that of our 
trade with India, is 13,000.000 pounds greater than our 
trade with Germany, and 40,000,000 pounds greater than 
the whole of our trade with the United States." How 
completely England has laid hands on all Irish resources 
is made clear from a recent publication that Mr. Cham- 
berlain's "Tariff Commission" issued towards the end of 
191 2. 

This document, entitled "The Economic Position of 
Ireland and its Relation to Tariff Reform,'" constitutes, in 
fact, a manifesto calling for the release of Ireland from 
the exclusive grip of Great Britain. Thus, for instance, 
in the section "External Trade of Ireland," we learn that 
Ireland exported in 19 10, £ 63,400,000 worth of Irish 
produce. Of this Great Britain took £ 52,600,000 worth, 
while some £ 10,800,000 went either to foreign coun- 
tries, or to British colonies, over £ 4,000,000 going to 
the United States. Of these £ 1 1,000,000 worth of Irish 
produce sent to distant countries, only £ 700,000 was 
shipped direct from Irish ports. 

The remainder, more than £ 10,000.000 although the 
markets it was seeking lay chiefly to the West, had to 
be shipped P^ast into Great Britain and to pay a heavy 
transit toll to that country for discharge, handling, agency, 
commission, and reloading on British vessels in British 
ports to steam back past the shores of Ireland it had just 
left. While Ireland, indeed, lies in the "line of trade," 
between all Northern Europe and the great world markets, 
she has been robbed of her trade and artificially deprived 
of the very position assigned to her by nature in the great 



26 

tides of* commercial intercourse. It is not only the geo- 
graphical situation and the trade and wealth of Ireland 
that England has laid hands on for her own aggrandize- 
ment, but she has also appropriated to her own ends the 
physical manhood of the Island. Just as the commerce 
has been forcibly annexed and diverted from its natural 
trend, so the youth of Ireland has been fraudulently ap- 
pro] )riated and diverted from the defense of their own 
land to the extension of the power and wealth of the 
realm that impoverished it at home . The physical qualities 
of the Irish were no less valuable than "Irish wool" to 
Empire building, provided always they were not displayed 
in Ireland. 

So long ago as 1 6 1 3 we find a candid admission in 
the State papers that the Irish were the better men in 
the field. "The next rebellion, whenever it shall happen, 
doth threaten more danger to the State than any heretofore, 
when the cities and walled towns were always faithful; 
(1) because they have the same bodies they ever had and 
therein they have and had advantage of us; (2) from in- 
fancy they have been and are exercised in the use of arms ; 
(3) the realm by reason of the long peace was never so 
full of youths: (4) that they are better soldiers than 
heretofore, their Continental employment in wars abroad 
assures us, and they do conceive that their men are better 
than ours.'" 

This testimony to Irish superiority, coming as it does 
from English official sources just three hundred years 
ago, would be convincing enough did it stand alone. But 
it is again and again reaffirmed by English commanders 
themselves as the reason for their failure in some parti- 
cular enterprise. In all else they were superior to the 
Irish; in arms, armament, munitions, supplies of food and 
money, here the long purse, settled organization and 
greater commerce of England, gaA r e her an overwhelming 



^7 

advantage. Moreover, the English lacked the moral 
restraints that imposed so severe a handicap on the Irish 
in their resistance. They owned no scruple of conscience 
in committing any crime that served their purpose. Beaten 
often in open tight by the hardier bodies, stouter arms 
and greater courage of the Irishmen, they nevertheless 
won the game by recourse to means that no Irishman, 
save him who had joined them for purposes of revenge or 
in pursuit of selfish personal aims, could possibly have 
adopted. The fight from the first was an unequal one. 
Irish valor, chivalry, and personal strength were matched 
against wealth, treachery and cunning. The Irish better 
bodies were overcome by the worse hearts. As Curran 
put it in 1 8 i 7 — "The triumph of England over Ireland 
is the triumph of guilt over innocence/' 

The Earl of Essex, who came to Ireland in 1599 with 
one of the largest forces of English troops that, up to 
then, had ever been dispatched into Ireland (1 8,000 men), 
ascribed his complete failure, in writing to the Queen, 
to the physical superiority of the Irish : 

"These rebels are more in number than your Majesty's 
army and have (though I do unwillingly confess it), better 
bodies, and perfecter use of their arms, than those men 
whom your Majesty sends over." 

The Queen, who followed the war in Ireland with a 
swelling wrath on each defeat, and a growing fear that 
the Spaniards would keep their promise to lend aid to 
the Irish Princes, O'Neill and O'Donnell, issued "Instruc- 
tions'" and a set of "Ordinances" for the conduct of the 
war in Ireland, which, while enjoining recourse to the 
usual methods outside the field of battle — (i. e. starvation, 
"politic courses," [assassination of leaders], and the sowing 
of dissension by means of bribery and promises), required 
for the conflict, that her weaker soldiers should lie protected 
against the onslaught of the unarmored Irishman by head 



28 

pieces of steel. She ordered "every soldier to be enforced 
to wear a murrion, because the enemy is encouraged by 
the advantage of arms to come to the sword wherein he 
commonly prevaileth." 

One of the Generals of the Spanish King, Phillip III, 
who came to Ireland in the Winter of 1 60 1 with a hand- 
ful of Spanish troops (200 men), to reinforce the small 
expedition of de Aguila in Kinsale, thus reported on the 
physical qualities of the Irish in a document that still lies 
in Salamanca, in the archives of the old Irish College. 
It was written by Don Pedro de Zubiarr on the 16 th of 
January, 1602, on his return to the Asturias. Speaking 
of the prospect of the campaign, he wrote: "If we had 
brought arms for 10,000 men we could have had them, 
for they are very eager to carry on the war against the 
English. The Irish are very strong and well shaped, 
accustomed to endure hunger and toil, and very courageous 
in light." 

Perhaps the most vivid testimony to the innate super- 
iority of the Irishman as a soldier is given in a typically 
Irish challenge issued in the war of 1641 . The document 
has a lasting interest, for it displays not only the "better 
body" of the Irishman of that day, but something of his 
better heart as well, that still remains to us. 

One, Parsons, an English settler in Ireland, had written 
1<> a friend to say that, among other things, the head of 
the Colonel of an Irish regiment then in the field against 
the English, would not be allowed to stick long on its 
shoulders. The letter was intercepted by the very regiment 
itself, and a Captain in it, Felim O'Molloy, wrote back 
to Parsons: 

"I will do this if you please: I will pick out sixty men 
and fight against one hundred of your choice men if you 
do but pitch your camp one mile out of your town, and 
then if you have the victory, you may threaten my Colonel ; 



2 9 

otherwise, do not reckon your chickens before they are 
hatched.'" 

The Anglo-Saxon preferred "politic courses'" to accept- 
ing the Irish soldier's challenge, even where all the ad- 
vantage was conceded by the Irishman to his foe and all 
the risks, save that of treachery (a very necessary pre- 
caution in dealing with the English in Ireland), cheerfully 
accepted by the Celt. 

This advantage of the "better bodies " the Irish retained 
beyond all question up to the Famine. It was upon it 
alone that the Wexford peasantry relied in 1798, and 
with it and by it alone that they again and again, armed 
with but pike and scythe swept disciplined regiments of 
English mercenaries in headlong rout from the field. 

This physical superiority of his countrymen was fre- 
quently referred to by O'Cormell as one of the forces he 
relied on. With the decay of all things Irish that has 
followed the famine, these physical attributes have de- 
clined along with so much else that was typical of the 
nation and the man. 

It could not to-day be fearlessly affirmed that sixty 
Irishmen were more than a match for one hundred Eng- 
lishmen; yet depleted as it is by the emigration of its 
strongest and healthiest children, by growing sickness 
and a changed and deteriorated diet, the Irish race still 
presents a type, superior physically, intellectually and 
morally to the English. It was on Irish soldiers that the 
English chiefly relied in the Boer War, and it is no ex- 
aggeration to say that could all the Irishmen in the ranks 
of the British army have been withdrawn, a purely Brit- 
ish force would have failed to end the war and the Dutch 
would have remained masters of the field in South Africa. 

It was the inglorious part of Ireland to be linked with 
those "methods of barbarism" she herself knew only too 
well, in extinguishing the independence of a people who 



30 

were attacked by the same enemy and sacrificed to the 
same greed that had destroyed her own freedom. 

Unhappy, indeed, is it for mankind as for her own fate 
and honor that Ireland should be forced by dire stress of 
fortune to aid her imperial wrecker in wrecking the for- 
tune and freedom of brave men elsewhere ! 

That these physical qualities of Irishmen, even with 
a population now only one tenth that of Great Britain 
are still of value to the Empire, Mr. Churchill's speech 
on the Home Rule Bill made frankly clear (February, 191 3). 
We now learn that the First Lord of the Admiralty has 
decided to establish a new Training Squadron, "with 
a base at Queenstown," where it is hoped to induce by 
the bribe of "Self-Government" the youth of Cork and 
Minister to again man the British fleet as they did in the 
days of Nelson, and we are even told that the prospects 
of brisk recruiting are "politically favorable." 

Carthage got her soldiers from Spain, her seamen, her 
slingers, from the Balearic Islands and the coasts of Africa, 
her money from the trade of the world. Rome beat 
her, but she did not leave a defeated Carthage to still 
levy toll of men and mind on those external sources of 
supply. 

Germany must fight, not merely to defeat the British 
fleet of to-day. but to neutralize the British fleet of to- 
morrow. Leave Ireland to Great Britain and that can 
never be. Neutralize Ireland and it is already accomplished. 

One of the conditions of peace, and for this reason the 
most important condition of peace that a victorious Ger- 
many must impose upon her defeated antagonist is that 
Ireland shall be separated and erected into an independent 
European State under international guarantees. England 
obviously would resist such conditions to the last, but 
then the last has already come before England would 
consent to any peace save on terms she dictated. 



A defeated England is a. starved England. She would 
have to accept whatever terms Germany imposed unless 
those terms provoked external intervention on behalf of 
the defeated Power. 

The price Germany seeks to win from victory is not 
immediate territorial aggrandizement obtained from an- 
nexing British possessions, nor a heavy money indemnity 
wrung from British finance and trade (although this she 
might have), but German freedom throughout the world 
on equal terms with Britain. This is a prize worth 
fighting for, for once gained the rest follows as a matter 
of course. 

German civilization released from the restricted confines 
and unequal position in which Britain had sought to pen 
it. must, of itself, win its way to the front, and of necess- 
ity acquire those favored spots necessary to its wider 
development. 

"This is the meaning of his (the German's) will for 
power; safety from interference with his individual and 
national development. Only one thing is left to the na- 
tions that do not want to be left behind in the peaceful 
rivalry of human progress — that is to become the equals 
of Germany in untiring industry, in scientific thorough- 
ness, in sense of duty, in patient persistence, in intelli- 
gent, voluntary submission to organization." ("History 
of German Civilization," by Ernst Richard, Columbia 
University, New York.) 

( )nce she had reduced Great Britain to an opposition 
based on peaceful rivalry in human progress, Germany 
would find the path of success hers to tread on more than 
equal terms, and many fields of expansion now closed 
would readily open to German enterprise without that 
people incurring and inflicting the loss and injury that 
an attempted invasion of the great self-governing domi- 
nions would so needlessly involve. Most of the British 



3 2 

self-governing colonies are to-day great states, well able 
to defend themselves from over-seas attack. The defeat 
of the British navy would make scarcely at all easier the 
landing of German troops in, say, Australia, South Africa, 
or New Zealand. A war of conquest of those far distant 
regions would be, for Germany, an impossible and a stu- 
pidly impossible task. 

A defeated England could not cede any of those Brit- 
ish possessions as a price of peace, for they are inhabited 
by freemen who, however they might deplore a German 
occupation of London, could in no wise be transferred by 
any pact or treaty made by others, to other rule than that 
of themselves. Therefore to obtain those British Domi- 
nions. Germany would have to defeat not merely England, 
but after that to begin a fresh war, or a series of fresh 
wars, at the ends of the earth, with exhausted resources 
and a probably crippled fleet. 

The thing does not bear inspection and may be dis- 
missed from our calculation. 

The only territories that England could cede by her 
own act to a victorious Power are such as, in themselves, 
are not suited to colonization by a white race. Doubtless, 
Germany would seek compensation for the expenses of 
the war in requiring the transfer of some of these latter 
territories of the British Crown to herself. There are 
points in Tropical Africa, in the East, islands in the ocean 
to-day flying the British flag that might, with profit to 
German trade and influence, be acquired by a victorious 
Germany. But none of these things in itself, nor all of 
them put together, would meet the requirements of the 
German case, or ensure to Germany that future tranquil 
expansion and peaceful rivalry the war had been fought 
to secure. England would be weakened, and to some ex- 
tend impoverished by a war ending which such results ; 
but her great asset, her possession beyond price would 



3$ 

still be hers — her geographical position. Deprive her to- 
day, say, of the Gold Coast, the Niger. Gibraltar, even 
of Egypt, impose a heavy indemnity, and while Germany 
would barely have recouped herself for the out-of-pocket 
losses of the war. England in fact would have lost no- 
thing, and ten years hence the Teuton would look out again 
upon the same prospect, a Europe still dominated beyond 
the seas by the Western Islanders. 

The work would have to be done all over again. A 
second Punic war would have to be fought with this dis- 
advantage — that the Atlantic Sicily would be held and 
used still against the Northern Rome by the Atlantic 
Carthage. 

A victorious Germany, in addition to such terms as she 
may find it well to impose in her own immediate finan- 
cial or territorial interests, must so draft her peace con- 
ditions as to preclude her great antagonist from ever again 
seriously imperilling the freedom of the seas. I know of 
no way save one to make sure the open seas. Ireland, in 
the name of Europe, and in the exercise of European right 
to free the seas from the over-lordship of one European 
island must be resolutely withdrawn from British custo- 
dy. A second Berlin conference, an international Con- 
gress must debate, and clearly would debate, with grow- 
ing unanimity the German proposal to restore Ireland to 
Europe. 

The arguments in favor of that proposal would soon 
become so clear from the general European standpoint 
that save England and her defeated allies, no Power would 
oppose it. 

Considerations of expediency no less than naval, mer- 
cantile, and moral claims would range themselves on the 
side of Germany and a free Ireland. For a free Ireland, 
not owned or exploited by England, but appertaining to 
Europe at large, its ports available in a sense they never 

3 



34 

can be while under British control, for purposes of general 
navigation and overseas intercourse, would soon become 
of such first rank importance in Continental affairs as to 
leave men stupified by the thought that for five hundred 
years they had allowed one sole member of their com- 
munity the exclusive use and selfish misappropriation of 
this, the most favored of European islands. 

Ireland would be freed, not because she deserved or 
asked for freedom, not because English rule has been a 
tyranny, a moral failure, a stupidity and a sin against the 
light; not because Germany cared for Ireland, but because 
the withdrawal of Ireland from English control appeared 
to be a very necessary step in international welfare and 
one very needful to the progress of German and European 
expansion . 

An Ireland released from the jail in which England had 
confined her would soon become a populous state of pos- 
sibly 10,000,000 to 12,000,000 people, a commercial 
asset of Europe in the Atlantic of the utmost general 
value, one holding an unique position between the Old 
and New Worlds, and possibly an intellectual and moral 
asset of no mean importance. This, and more a sovereign 
Ireland means to Europe. Above all it means security of 
transit, equalizing of opportunity, freedom of the seas — an 
assurance that the great waterways of the ocean should 
no longer be at the absolute mercy of one member of the 
European family, and that one the least interested in 
general European welfare. 

The stronger a free Ireland grew the surer would be 
the guarantee that the role of England "consciously as- 
sumed for many years past, to be an absolute and wholly 
arbitrary judge of war and peace" had gone forever, and 
that at last the "balance of power" was kept by fair 
weight and fair measure and not with loaded scales. 



35 

Part III. 

(Written in March, 1913.) 

I believe England to be the enemy of European peace, 
and that until her "mastery of the sea'" is overmastered 
by Europe, there can be no peace upon earth or goodwill 
among men. Her claim to rule the seas, and the conse- 
quences, direct and indirect, that flow from its assertion 
are the chief factors of international discord that now 
threaten the peace of the world. 

In order to maintain that indefensible claim she is 
driven to aggression and intrigue in every quarter of the 
globe ; to setting otherwise friendly peoples by the ears ; 
to forming "alliances" and ententes, to dissolving friend- 
ships, the aim always being the old one, divide et impera. 

The fact that Europe to-day is divided into armed 
camps is mainly due to English effort to retain that mas- 
tery of the sea. It is generally assumed, and the idea is 
propagated by English agencies, that Europe owes her 
burden of armaments to the antagonism between France 
and Germany, to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by France, 
and the spirit and hope of a "revanche" thereby engen- 
dered. But this antagonism has long ceased to be the 
chief factor that moulds European armaments. 

Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope 
it proffers, France would ere this have resigned herself, 
as the two provinces have done, to the solution imposed 
by the War of 1870. It is England and English ambition 
that beget the state of mind responsible for tha enormous 
growth of armaments that now overshadows Continental 
civilization. Humanity hemmed in in Central Europe by a 
forest of bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of 
a larger world by a forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is 
called to Peace Conferences and Arbitration Treaties by 
the very Power whose fundamental maxim of rule ensures 



36 

war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of 
the Old World. 

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own 
hands she must strangle the Sea serpent whose eoils 
enfold her shores. 

Inspect the foundations of European armaments where 
we will, and we shall find that the Master Builder is he 
who fashioned the British Empire It is that Empire, its 
claim to a universal right of pre-emption to every zone 
and region washed by the waves and useful or necessary 
to the expansion of the white races, and its assertion of 
a right to control at will all the seas of all the world that 
drives the peoples of Europe into armed camps. The 
policy of the Boer War is being tried on a vaster scale 
against Europe. Just as England beat the Boers by con- 
centration camps and not by arms, by money and not by 
men, so she seeks to-day to erect an armor-plate barrier 
around the one European people she fears to meet in the 
field, and to turn all Central Europe into a vast con- 
centration camp. By use of the longest purse she has al- 
ready carried this barrier well towards completion. One 
gap remains, and it is to make sure that this opening, 
too, shall be closed, that she now directs all the force of 
her efforts. Here the longest purse is of less avail, so 
England draws upon another armory. She appeals to 
the longest tongue in history — the longest and some- 
thing else. 

In order to make sure the encompassing of Europe with 
a girdle of steel it is necessary to circle the United States 
with a girdle of lies. With America true to the policy 
of her great founder, an America, " the friend of all Powers 
but the ally of none," English designs against European 
civilization must in the end fail. Those plans can succeed 
only by active American support, and to secure this is 
now the supreme task and aim of British stealth and skill. 



37 

Every tool of her diplomacy, polished and unpolished, 
from the trained envoy to the boy scout and the minor 
poet has been tried in turn. The pulpit, the bar, the press, 
the society hostess, the Cabinet Minister and the Cabinet 
Minister's wife, the ex-Cabinet Minister and the royal 
family itself, and last, but not least, even "Irish Natio- 
nality"' — all have been pilgrims to that shrine, and each 
has been carefully primed, loaded, well-aimed, and then 
turned full on the weak spots in the armor of republican 
simplicity. To the success of these resources of panic the 
falsification of history becomes essential and the vilifi- 
cation of the most peace-loving people of Europe. The 
past relations of England with the United States are to 
be blotted out, and the American people who are by blood 
so largely Germanic, are to be entrapped into an attitude 
of suspicion, hostility, and resentment against the country 
and race from whom they have received nothing but good. 
Germany is represented as the enemy, not to England's 
indefensible claim to own the seas, but to American ideals 
on the American Continent. Just as the Teuton has be- 
come the "Enemy of Civilization " in the Old World be- 
cause he alone has power, strength of mind, and force of 
purpose to seriously dispute the British hegemony of the 
seas, so he is assiduously represented as the only threat 
to American hegemony of the New World. 

This, the keynote of the attack on Germany, is sounded 
from every corner of the British Empire, wherever the 
Imperial editor, resting from the labors of the lash he 
wields against the colored toilers in mine or camp, directs 
his eyes from the bent forms of these indentured slaves 
of dividend to the erect and stalwart frames of the new 
Goths who threaten the whole framework of Imperial divi- 
dend from across the North Sea. From the Times to the 
obscurest news-sheet of the remotest corner of the British 
dominions the word has gone forth. 



33 

The Monroe Doctrine, palladium of the Anglo-Saxon 
World Empire, is imperilled by German ambitions and 
were it not for the British fleet, America would be lost 
to the Americans. Wherever Englishmen are gathered 
to-day their journals, appealing possibly to only a hand- 
ful of readers, assert that the function of the British fleet 
is to exclude the European States, with Germany at their 
head, from South America, not because in itself that is a 
right or worthy end to pursue, but because that Continent 
is ear-marked for future exploitation and control by their 
"kinsmen*' of the United States, and they need the sup- 
port of those "kinsmen" in their battle against Germany. 

I need quote but a single utterance from the mass of 
seditious libels of this character before me to show how 
widespread is this propaganda of falsehood and how 
sustained is the effort being made to poison the American 
mind against the only people in Europe England genuinely 
fears, and therefore wholeheartedly hates. 

The Natal Mercury, for instance, a paper written for 
the little town of Durban and appealing to a population 
of only some 30,000 whites, in a recent issue (March, 
191 3), devoted a leader to the approaching "Peace Cen- 
tennial'" of 19 14, to be held in commemoration of the 
signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the second war 
between Great Britain and the American people in 18 14. 

"After all, blood is thicker than water," quotes the 
Natal Journal with satisfaction, and after pointing out 
some latter-day indications of rapprochement between 
England and the United States, it goes on to proclaim 
the chief function of the British navy and the claim 
thereby established on the goodwill of America. 

"We make mention of them because such incidents 
are likely to repeat themselves more and more frequently 
in that competition for naval supremacy in Europe which 
compels the United States to put her own fleets into 



39 

working order and to join in the work that England has 
hitherto been obliged to perform unaided. 

'•It is England that polices the Seven Seas, and Ame- 
rica has reaped no small benefits from the self-imposed 
task, an aspect of the matter to which every thougthful 
American is fully alive. There is a real and hearty 
recognition in the New World of the silent barrier that 
Great Britain has set up to what might become some- 
thing more than a dream of expansion into South Ame- 
rica on the port of one potent European State. It is, in- 
deed, hardly too much to say that the maintenance of 
the Monroe Doctrine is at the present moment, almost 
as fully guaranteed by England as it is by the country 
which enunciated the policy and is the chief gainer by 
it. It is a case in which a silet understanding is of far 
greater value than a formal compact that 'would serve 
as a target for casual discontent on this side or that." 

The article concludes by proclaiming "the precious 
permanence of an unseen bond" and the lofty and en- 
during worth of "good faith mutually acknowledged and 
the ultimate solidarity of mutual interests rightly pre- 
ceived." "The ultimate solidarity" aimed at by those 
who direct these world-wide pronouncements is not one 
of mere sterile friendship between the American and the 
British peoples. American friendship with England is 
only worth having when it can be translated by world 
acts into enmity against Germany. 

It might truly be said of the British Empire to-day 
that where two or three are gathered together, there ha- 
tred of Germany shall be in the midst of them. Turn 
where we will, from the Colonies to England, from Eng- 
land to her fleet, from the seas to the air, the Englishman 
lives and moves and has his being in an atmosphere not 
of love, but of hatred. And this, too, a hatred, fear and 
jealousy of a people who have never injured him, who 



4 o 

have never warred upon him, and whose sole crime is 
that they are highly efficient rivals in the peaceful rivalry 
of commerce, navigation, and science. 

We are told, for instance, in one of the popular London 
magazines for January, 191 3, in an article upon the finan- 
cial grievances of the British navy that were it not for 
Germany there would be to-day another Spithead mutiny. 
"Across the North Sea is a nation which some fifty years 
ago was so afraid of the French navy that it panicked 
itself into building an iron-clad fleet. 

"To-day, as the second naval Power, its menace is too 
great for any up-to-date Spithead mutiny to come off. But 
the pay question was so acute that it is possibly only the 
Germans and their 'menace' that saved us from trouble."' 

But while the patriotism of the "lower deck'* may have 
been sufficiently stout to avert this peril, the patriotism 
of the quarter-deck is giving us a specimen of its quality 
that certainly could not be exhibited in any other country 
in the world. 

Even as I write I read in the "British Review'' how 
Admiral Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles 
Beresford, dubs him "the laughing-stock of the fleet,'" 
accuses him of publishing in his book, "The Betrayal,"" 
a series of "deliberate falsehoods,'" and concludes by 
saying that the gallant Admiral is "not a seaman." 

And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these 
that is to sweep the German navy from the seas! 

During the Crimean War the allied British and French 
navies distinguished themselves by their signal failure to 
effect the reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, 
Helsingfors and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf 
of Finland. Their respective Admirals fired their severest 
broadsides into each other, and the bombardment of the 
forts was silenced by the smart interchange of nautical 
civilities between the two flagships. Napoleon III, who 



4i 

sought an explanation of this failure of his fleet, was given 
a reply that I cannot refrain from recommending to the 
British Admiralty to-day. "Well, Sire," replied the French 
diplomatist who knew the circumstances, "both the 
Admirals were old women, but ours was at least a lady." 
If British Admirals cannot put to sea without incurring 
this risk, they might, at least, take the bumboat woman 
with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval debate. 

That England to-day loves America no one who goes 
to the private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their 
published utterances, or the interested eulogies of their 
press, can for a moment believe. 

The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt 
for the "Yankee" and all his ways. "God's Englishman" 
no more loves an American citizen now than when in 
i 846 he seriously contemplated an invasion of the United 
States and the raising of the negro-slave population against 
his "Anglo-Saxon kinsmen." 

To-day when we near so much of the Anglo-Saxon 
Alliance it may be well to revert to that page of history. 
For it will show us that if a British Premier to-day can 
speak as Mr. Asquith did on December 16 th , 191 2, in his 
reference to the late American Ambassador as "a great 
American and a kinsman," one "sprung from a common 
race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth 
as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished tradi- 
tions and participating when he comes here by what I may 
describe as his natural right in our domestic, interests and 
celebrations," then this new-found kinship takes its birth 
not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very 
common fear of Germany. 

In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in 
robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the 
work of the famine should be complete and that the then 
too great population of Ireland should be reduced within 



4 2 

the limits "law and order ' ' prescribed, either by starvation 
or flight to America. 

Fleeing in hundreds of thousands from the rule of one 
who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multi- 
tude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish King- 
shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugi- 
tive Irish Nation found friendship, hope and homes in the 
bosom of the great Celtic Republic of the West. All that 
was denied to them in their own ancient land they here 
found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic. 
And the hate of England pursued them here and those 
who dared to give them help and shelter. The United 
States were opening wide their arms to receive the stream 
of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of 
England's infamous rule in Ireland. This could not be 
brooked. England in those days had not invented the 
Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany 
had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her sta- 
tesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen. 
So the greatest ministers of Queen Victoria seriously 
eomteinplated war with America and naturally looked 
around for someone else to do the fighting. The Duke of 
Wellington hoped that France might be played on, just 
as in a later day a later minister seeks to play France in 
a similar role against a later adversary. 1 The Mexicans, 
too, might be induced to invade the Texan frontier. But 
a greater infamy than this was seriously planned. Again 
it is an Irishman who tells the story and shows us how 
dearly the English loved their trans- Atlantic "kinsmen" 
when there was no German menace to threaten nearer 
home. 

Writing from Carlsruhe, on January 26 th , 1846, to his 
friend, Alexander Spencer, in Dublin, Charles Lever said: 

1 Sir E. Grey and the ■' Entente Cordial?" 



43 

"As to the war the Duke 1 says he could smash the 
Yankees, and ought to do so while France is in her present 
humor and Mexico opens the road to invasion, from the 
South— not to speak of the terrible threat that Napier 
uttered, that with two regiments of infantry and a field 
battery he'd raise the slave population in the United States/* 

The infamy of this suggestion cannot be surpassed. 
The brilliant soldier who conceived it was the chivalrous 
Englishman who conquered Scinde, one of the chief glories 
of the Britannic hierarchy of soldier-saints. 

The Government planning it was that of the late Queen 
Victoria with the Duke of Wellingtons advice, and the 
people against whom the black slave millions were to be 
loosed were the "kith and kin" of those meditating this 
atrocious form of massacre. Truly, as an old Irish proverb, 
old even in the days of Henry VIII, put it, " the pride of 
France, the treason of England and the warre of Irelande 
shall never have end." 

As a latter-day witness of that treason, one who had 
suffered it and knew it from birth to the prison cell, a 
dead Irishman speaks to us from the grave. Michael Davitt, 
in a letter to Morrison Davidson, on August 27 th , 1902, 
thus summed up in final words what every Irishman 
feels in his heart: 

"The idea of being ruled by Englishmen is to me the 
chief agony of existence. They are a nation without faith, 
truth or conscience, enveloped in a panoplied pharasaism 
and an incurable hypocrisy. Their moral appetite is fed 
on falsehood. They profess Christianity and believe only 
in Mammon. They talk of liberty while ruling India and 
Ireland against the principles of a constitution, professed 
as a political faith, but prostituted to the interests of 
class and landlord rule." 



1 The Duke of Wellington; the report was brought to Lever by the 
.Marquis of Douro, the Duke's heir. 



44 

Have Englishmen in less than two generations sub- 
stituted love for the hate that Napier, Wellington, and 
the Queens Ministers felt and expressed in 1846 for the 
people of the United States? Is it love to-day of America 
or fear of someone else that impels to the "Arbitration 
Treaties'" and the celebration of the "Hundred Years of 
Peace?" 

The Anglo-American "Peace Movement" was to be 
but the first stage in an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance," intended 
to limit and restrict all further world changes, outside of 
certain prescribed Continental limits, to these two peoples 
alone on the basis of a new "Holy Alliance," whose motto 
should be " Beati possidentes." 

Since England and America, either in fact or by reser- 
vation enjoy almost all the desirable regions of the earth, 
why not bring about a universal agreement to keep every 
one in his right place, to stay "just as we are," and to 
kindly refer all possible differences to an "International 
Tribunal?" 

Once again the British Bible was thrown into the scale 
and the unrighteousness of Germany, who did not see her 
way to join in the psalm singing, was exposed in a spirit 
of bitter resignation and castigated with an appropriate 
selection of texts. The Hague Tribunal would be so much 
nicer than a war of armaments ! With no reckless rivalries 
of naval and military expenditure there could be no question 
of the future of mankind. 

An idyllic peace would settle down upon the nations, 
contentedly possessing each its own share of the good 
things of life, and no questionable ambitions would be 
allowed to disturb the buying and selling of the smaller 
and weaker peoples. The sincerity of the wish for uni- 
versal arbitration can be best shown by England when 
she, or any of the Powers to whom she appeals, will 
consent to submit the claim of one of the minor peoples 



45 

she or they hold in subjection to the Hague Tribunal. 
Let France admit Madagascar. Siam. or her latest victim, 
Morocco, to the franchise of the Court. Let Russia agree 
to Poland or Finland seeking the verdict of this bench 
of appeal. Let England plead her case before the same 
high moral tribunal and allow Ireland, Egypt, or India 
to have the law of her. Then, and not until then, the 
world of little States and beaten peoples may begin to 
believe that the Peace Crusade has some foundation in 
honor and honesty— but not till then. Germany has had 
the straightforwardness and manliness to protest that she 
is still able to do her own shooting and that what she 
holds she will keep, by force if need be and what she 
wants she will, in her own sure time, take, and by force, 
too, if need be. Of the two cults, the latter is the simpler, 
sincerer, and certainly the less dishonest. 

Irish-American, linked with German-American keen- 
sighted hostility did the rest. The rivalry of Mr. Roose- 
velt and Mr. Taft aided, and the effort (for the time at 
any rate), has been wrecked, thereby plunging England 
into a further paroxysm of religious despondency and 
grave concern for German morals. This mood eventuated 
in Lord Haldane's "week-end"' trip to Berlin. The voice 
was the voice of Jacob, in spite of the hand of Esau. Mr. 
Churchill, at Glasgow, showed the real hand and the 
mess of pottage so amiably offered at Berlin bought no 
German birthright. The Kmiz-Zntung rightly summed up 
the situation by pointing out that "Mr. Churchill's testi- 
mony can now be advanced as showing that the will of 
England alone comes in question as the exponent of peace, 
and that England for many years past has consciously as- 
sumed the role of an absolute and perfectly arbitrary 
judge of war and peace. It seems to us all the more sig- 
nificant that Mr. Churchill proposes also in the future to 
control, with the help of the strong navies of the Domi^ 



4 6 

nions, the trade and naval movements of all the Powers 
on the face of the earth — that is to say. his aim is to se- 
cure a world monopoly for England." There has never 
been any other thought in the English mind. As I said 
in part I of this paper. "British interests are first the 
control of all the seas of all the world in full military and 
commercial control. If this be not challenged peace is 
permitted; to dispute it seriously means war. 

Germany is driven by necessity to dispute it seriously 
and to overcome it. She cannot get out to play her part 
in world life, nay, she cannot hope to ultimately maintain 
herself at home until that battle has been fought and won. 

Arrangements with England, detentes, understandings, 
call them what you will, are merely parleys before the 
light. The assault must be delivered, the fortress carried, 
or else Germany and with her, Europe, must resign the 
mission of the white races and hand over the government 
and future of the world to one chosen people. 

Europe reproduces herself yearly at the present time 
at the rate of about five million souls. Some three-fifths 
of this number are to-day absorbed into the life of the 
Continent, the balance go abroad and principally to North 
America, to swell the English-speaking world. Germany 
controls about one-fifth of Europe's natural annual in- 
crease, and realizing that emigration to-day means only 
to lose her people and build up her antagonist's strength, 
she has for years now striven to keep her people within 
German limits, and hitherto with successful results far in 
excess of any achieved by other European States. But 
the limit must be reached, and that ere many years are 
past. Where is Germany to find the suitable region, both 
on a scale and under conditions of climate, health and 
soil that a people of say 90,000,000 hemmed in a terri- 
tory little larger than France, will find commensurate to 
their needs? No other European people is in such plight. 



47 

Russia has the immense and healthy world of Siberia, 
into which to overflow. France, far from needing outlets, 
increases not at all, and during 1 9 1 1 showed an excess 
of close on 40,000 deaths over births. For France the day 
of greatness is past. A French Empire, in any other sense 
than the Roman one of commercial and military exploi- 
tation of occupied territories and subjugated peoples is 
gone forever. 

France has no blood to give except in war. French 
blood will not colonize even the Mediterranean littoral. 
Italy is faced with something of the same problem as 
Germany, but to a lesser extent. Her surplus population 
already finds a considerable outlet in Argentina and Sou- 
thern Brazil, among peoples, institutions, and language 
largely approximating to those left behind. While Italy 
has, indeed, need, of a world policy as well as Germany, 
her ability to sustain a great part abroad cannot be com- 
pared to that of the Teutonic people. Her claim is not so 
urgent; her need not so insistent, her might inadequate. 

The honesty and integrity of the German mind, the 
strength of the German intellect, the skill of the German 
hand and brain, the justice and vigor of German law. the 
intensity of German culture, science, education and social 
development, these need a great and healthy field for their 
beneficial display, and the world needs these things more 
than it needs the British mastery of the seas. The world 
of European life needs to-day, as it needed in the days 
of a decadent Roman world empire, the coming of another 
Goth, the coming of the Teuton. The interposing island 
in the North Sea alone intervenes. How to surmount that 
obstacle, how to win the freedom of the "Seven Seas" 
for Europe must be the supreme issue for Germany. 

If she fails she is doomed to sterility. The supreme test 
of German genius, of German daring, of German discipline, 
of Hohenzollern Kingship and imagination lies there. 



48 

Where Louis XIV, the Directory, and Napoleon failed, 
will the heir of Karl the Great see clearly? 

And then, when that great hour has struck, will Ger- 
many, will Europe, produce the statesman-soldier who 
shall see that the key to ocean freedom lies in that island 
beyond an island, whose very existence Europe has for- 
gotten? 

Till that key is cut from the Pirate's girdle, Germany 
may win a hundred Austerlitzes on the Vistula, the Dnie- 
per, the Loire, but until she restores that key to Europe, 
to paraphrase Pitt, she may "roll up that map of the 
world; it will not be wanted these fifty years." ' 



Part IV. 

(Written in March, 19 13.) 

The foregoing reflections and the arguments drawn 
from them were penned before the outbreak of the war 
between Turkey and the Balkan Allies. 1 

That war is still undecided as I write (March, 19 13), 
but whatever its precise outcome may be, it is clear that 
the doom of Turkey as a great power is sealed, and that 
the complications of the Near East will, in future, assume 
an entirely fresh aspect. Hitherto, there was always the 
possibility that Germany might find at least a commercial 
and financial outlet in the Asiatic dominions of the Sul- 
tan. There was even the possibility, had Turkey held 
together, that England, to mitigate pressure elsewhere, 
would have conceded to an expanding and insistent Ger- 
many a friendly interest and control in Asia Minor. It 
is true that the greatest possible development, and under 
the most favored conditions of German interests in that 
region, could not have met the needs or satisfied the ever 
increasing necessities of Teutonic growth; but at least it 
would have offered a safety valve, and could have in- 
volved preoccupations likely to deflect the German vision, 
for a time, from the true path to greatness, the western 
highways of the sea. 

An occupation or colonization of the Near East by the 
Germanic peoples could never have been a possible solu- 
tion under any circumstances of the problem that faces 
German statesmanship. As well talk of reviving the Frank 
Kingdom of Jerusalem. 

The occupation by the fair-haired peoples of the Bal- 
tic and North Seas of the lands of Turk and Tartar, of 
Syrian and Jew, of Armenian and Mesopotamian, was 

1 Save for a few newspaper extracts and remarks appended to 
them, Articles I, II and III, were written in August, 191 1, and Sep- 
tember, 191 2. 



5Q 

never a practical suggestion or one to be seriously con- 
templated. "East is East and West is West," sings the 
poet of Empire, and Englishmen cannot complain if the 
greatest of Western peoples, adopting the singer, should 
apply the dogma to themselves. Germany, indeed, might 
have looked for a considerable measure of commercial 
dominance in the Near East, possibly for a commercial 
protectorate such as France applies to Tunis and Algeria, 
and hopes to apply to Morocco, or such as England im- 
poses on Egypt, and this commercial predominance could 
have conferred considerable profits on Rhenish industries 
and benefited Saxon industrialism, but it could never 
have done more than this. A colonization of the realms 
of Bajazet and Saladin by the fair-skinned peoples of the 
North, or the planting of Teutonic institutions in the 
Valley of Damascus, even with the benevolent neutrality 
of England, is a far wilder dream (and one surely no Ger- 
man statesman ever entertained), than a German challenge 
to the sea supremacy of England. 

The trend of civilized man in all great movements since 
modern civilization began, has been from East to West, 
not from West to East. The tide of the peoples moved 
by some mysterious impulse from the dawn of European 
expansion has been towards the setting sun. The few 
movements that have taken place in the contrary direction 
have but emphasized the universality of this rule, from 
the days of the overthrow of Rome, if we seek no earlier 
date. The Crusades furnished, doubtless, the classic 
example. The later contrary instance, that of Russia to- 
wards Siberia, scarcely, if at all, effects the argument, for 
there the Russian overflow is filling up Northern rather 
than Eastern lands, and the movement involves to the 
Russian emigrant no change of climate, soil, law, language 
or environment, while that emigrant himself belongs, per- 
haps, as much to Asia as to Europe. 



5* 

But whatever value to German development the possible 
chances of expansion in the Near East may have offered 
before the present Balkan War, those chances to-day. as 
the result of that war, scarcely exist. It is, probably the 
perception of this outcome of the victory of the Slav States 
that has influenced and accelerated the characteristic 
change of English public opinion that has accompanied 
with shouts of derision the dying agonies of the Turk. "In 
matters of mind," as a recent English writer says in the 
Saturday Review, "the national sporting instinct does not 
exist. The English public invariably backs the winner." 
And just as the English public invariably backs the winner, 
British policy invariably backs the anti-German, or suppo- 
sedly anti-German side in all world issues. "What 191 2 
seems to have effected is a vast aggrandizement of the 
Slavonic races in their secular struggle against the Teu- 
tonic races. Even a local and temporary triumph of Austria 
over Servia cannot conceal the fact that henceforth the 
way Southeast to the Black Sea and the iEgean Sea is 
barred to the Germans." 1 

That is the outstanding fact that British public opinion 
perceives with growing pleasure from the breakup of 
Turkey. 

No matter where the dispute or what the purpose of 
conflict may be, the supreme issue for England is "Where 
is Germany?" 

Against that side the whole weight of Great Britain 
will, openly or covertly, be thrown. German expansion 
in the Near East has gone by the board, and in its place 
the development of Greek naval strength in the Mediter- 
ranean, to take its stand by the Triple Entente, comes to 
be jauntily considered, while the solid wedge of a Slav 
Empire or Federation, commanding in the near future 



1 Mr. Frederick Harrison in the Emglish Review, January, 1912. 



2,ooo.ooo of armed men, is agreeably seen to be driven 
across Southeastern Europe between Austro-German 
efforts and the fallow lands of Asia Minor. These latter 
can safely be left in Turkish hands yet a while longer, 
until the day comes for their partition into "spheres of 
influence ; : ' just as Persia and parts of China are to-day 
being apportioned between Russia and England. This 
happy consummation, moreover, has fallen from heaven. 
ai\d Turkey is being cut up for the further extension of 
British interests clearly by the act of God. 

The victory of the Balkan States becomes another 
triumph for the British Bible ; it is the victory of right- 
eousness over wrongdoing. 

The true virtue of the Balkan "Christians" lies in the 
possibility of their being moulded into an anti-German fac- 
tor of great weight in the European conflict clearly im- 
pending, and in their offering a fresh obstacle, it is hoped, 
to German world policy. 

Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of 
its professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of 
the Balkan allies to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon 
a just and historic basis. 

Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European 
provinces by a right or conquest only. What the sword 
took, the sword may take away. When the sword was 
struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right to anything it 
had given him fell, too. Thus Adrianople — a city he has 
held for over five hundred years — must be given up to 
a new conqueror 1 , to a conqueror who never owned it in 
the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to 
be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers. 

But the moral argument brings strange revenges. 

1 This was written before the second Balkan War began between 
Bulgaria and her former allies. 



53 

If Turkey has no right to Adrianople. to Thrace — 
•'right of the sword to be shattered by the sword"' — what 
right has England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork? She 
holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which 
Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonica — 
a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization. If Tur- 
key's rights, nearly six hundred years old, can be shat- 
tered in a day by one successful campaign, and if the 
Powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that this suc- 
cessful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries, 
then, indeed, have the Powers, led by England, furnished 
a precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next 
great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near 
West, when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the 
hands of a conqueror whose title is no better, indeed, 
somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And 
when the day of defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the 
Near West, then shall an assembled Europe remember 
the arguments of 191 2 — 13 and a freed Ireland shall be 
justified on the very grounds England to-day has been 
the first to advance against a defeated Turkey. 

"But the Turk is an Asiatic." say the English Bashaws : 
to which, indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are 
the English European or non-European?" The moral 
argument and the "Asiatic argument" are strange texts 
for the desecrator of Christian Ireland to appeal to against 
that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan 
and Indian battleships and Canadian and Australasian 
dreadnoughts. Not the moral argument, but the anti- 
German argument, furnishes the real ground for the 
changed British attitude in the present war. 

The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern 
her Christian peoples, is only the pretext; but just as the 
moral argument brings its strange revenges and shows 
an Ireland that has suffered all that Macedonia has 



54 

suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not of 
Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from 
benefiting Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment. 

The present apparent injury to German interests by 
the closing of Southeastern Europe and the road to Asia 
Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resol- 
utely face the problem of opening the western seaways. 
To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept 
a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle. 

Hemmed in by Russia .on the East and the New 
Southern Slav states on the South East, with a vengeful 
France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh 
dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing 
still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways 
of the world. The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift'" 
of a battleship, come as fresh rivets in the chain forged 
for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might more 
truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of 
the German people. 

We read in a recent periodical how these latest naval 
developments portend the coming of the day when "the 
Imperial navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a police- 
man does the peace of the streets. The time is coming 
when a naval war (except by England), will be as relent- 
lessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (Review of 
Reviews, December, 1 9 1 2 .) 

The naive arrogance of this utterance is characteristic- 
ally English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of 
the Churchill Glasgow speech and the fullest justification 
of the criticism of the Kreuz-Zeiiung already quoted. It 
does not stand alone ; it could be paralleled in the columns 
of any ordinary English paper — Liberal as much as Con- 
servative — every day in the week. Nothing is clearer 
than that no Englishman can think of other nations save 
in terms of permanent inferiority. Thus, for instance, in 



55 

a November, (191 2), issue of the Daily News we find a 
representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgcumbe), addressing 
that Liberal journal in words that no one but an English- 
man would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. 
Edgcumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round 
to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free 
gift of the toiling Tamils, Javanese, Chinese, and other 
rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the 
population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an 
arbitrary tax imposed on these humble but indifferent 
Asiatics by their English administration. 

Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgcumbe asserted 
these poor workers nourished a reverence ''bordering on 
veneration" for the Englishman. "This is shown in a 
curious way by their refusing to call any European 'a 
white man' save the Englisman alone. The German trader, 
the Italian, the Frenchman and all are. in their speech, 
'colored men."' 

After this appreciation of themselves the English can- 
not object to the present writer's view that they are non- 
Europeans. 

Thus, while the Eastern question is being settled while 
I write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, Eng- 
land, who leads the cry in the name of Europe, is pre- 
paring the exclusion of Europe from all world affairs that 
can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held 
for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than 
that by which England has held Ireland, are being for- 
cibly restored to Europe. So be it. 

With the settlement of the Eastern question by this 
act of restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity 
of vision to deal with the Western question by a similar 
act of restoration. 

The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern 
fellow. Like those of the Orient, the problems of the 



56 

Occident for Europe are two-fold — a near Western and 
a far Western question. Ireland, keeper of the seas, con- 
stitutes for Europe the near Western question. 

The freedom of those seas and their opening to all 
European effort alike on equal terms constitutes the far 
Western question. But in both cases the antagonist of 
Europe, the non-European power is the same. The chal- 
lenge of Europe must be to England, and the champion 
of Europe must be and can be only Germany. No other 
European people has the power, the strength of mind, of 
purpose, and of arm to accomplish the great act of deliv- 
erance. Europe, too long blinded to her own vital in- 
terests while disunited, must now, under the guidance of 
a united Germany, resolutely face the problem of freeing 
the seas. 

THAT WAR OF THE SEAS IS INEVITABLE. It 
maybe fought on a Continent; it may be waged in the 
air — it must be settled on the seas and it must mean 
either the freeing of those seas or the permanent exclusion 
of Europeans from the affairs of the world. It means for 
Europe the future, the very existence of European civili- 
zation as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon world dominion. 
In that war, Germany will stand not alone as the cham- 
pion of Europe, she will fight for the freedom of the 
world. 

As an Irishman, I have no fear of the result to Ireland 
from a German triumph. I pray for it; for with the com- 
ing of that day the "Irish Question," so dear to British 
politicians, becomes a European, a world question. 

With the humbling of Great Britain and the destruction 
of her sea ownership, European civilization assumes anew 
stature, and Ireland, oldest and yet youngest of the Eu- 
ropean peoples, shall enter into free partnership with the 
civilization, culture, and prosperity that that act of libe- 
ration shall bring to mankind. 



PartV. 

(Written in November-December, 19 13.) 

It is only the truth that wounds. An Irishman to-day 
in dealing with Englishmen is forced, if he speak truly, 
to wound. That is why so many Irishmen do not speak 
the truth. The Irishman, whether he be a peasant, a farm 
laborer, however low in the scale of Anglicization he may 
have sunk is still in imagination, if not always in manner, 
a gentleman. 

The Englishman is a gentleman by chance, by force of 
circumstance, by luck of birth, or some rare opportunity 
of early fellowship. The Irishman is a gentleman by in- 
stinct and shrinks from wounding the feelings of another 
man and particularly of the man who has wounded him. 
He scorns to take it out of him that way. That is why 
the task of misgoverning him has been so easy and has 
come so naturally to the Englishman. One of the chief 
grievances of the Irishman in the middle ages was that 
the man who robbed him was such a boor. Insult was 
added to injury in that the oppressor was no knight in 
shining armor, but a very churl of men ; to the courteous 
and cultured Irishman a "bodach Sassenach'" a man of low 
blood, of low cunning, caring only for the things of the 
body, with no veneration for the things of the spirit 
— with, in fine, no music in his soul. The things that 
the Irishman loved he could not conceive of. Without 
tradition or history himself he could not comprehend the 
passionate attachment of the Irishman to both, and he 
proceeded to wipe both out, so far as in him lay, from 
off the map of Ireland and from out the Irishman's con- 
sciousness. 

Having, as he believed, with some difficulty accom- 
plished his task, he stands to-day amazed at the result. 
The Irishman has still a grievance — nay, more, Ireland 



5S 

talks of "wrongs." But lias she not got him? What more 
can she want — except his purse? And, that too, she is 
now taking. In the indulgence of an agreeable self-conceit 
which supplies for him the want of imagination he sees 
Ireland to-day as a species of " sturdy beggar," — half 
mendicant, half pickpocket — making off with the proceeds 
of his hard day's work. The past slips from him as a 
dream. Has he not for years now, well, for thirty years, 
certainly, a generation, a lifetime, done all in his power- 
to meet the demands of this incessant country that more 
in sorrow than in anger he will grant you, was misgover- 
ned in the past. That was its misfortune, never his fault. 
This is a steadily recurring phase of the fixed halluci- 
nation in his blood. Ireland never is, but only always has 
been cursed by English rule. He, himself, the English- 
man of the day, is always a simple, bluff, goodhearted 
fellow. His father, if you like, his grandfather very 
probably, misgoverned Ireland, but never he himself. 
Why, just look at him now, his hand never out of 
his pocket relieving the shrill cries of Irish distress. 
There she stands, a poverty stricken virago at his door, 
shaking her bony fist at him, Celtic porter in her eye, the 
most fearful apparition in history, his charwoman, sha- 
ming him before the neighbors and demanding payment 
for long past spring cleanings that he, good soul, has for- 
gotten all about or is quite certain were settled at the time. 
Yes, there she stands, the Irish charwoman, the old 
broom in her hand and preparing for one last clean sweep 
that shall make the house sweet and fit for her own 
children. And John Bull, honest, sturdy John Bull, be- 
lieving the house to be his, thinks that the only thing 
between him and the woman is a matter of wages ; that 
all she wants is an extra shilling. Ireland wants but one 
thing in the world. She wants her house to herself and 
the stranger out of the house. 



59 

While he is, in his heart, perfectly aware of this, John 
Bull (for the reasons given by Richard Cox), is quite 
determined that nothing shall get him out of the house. 
"Separation is unthinkable"' say English Ministers. The 
task of Ireland is to-day what it always has been — to 
get the stranger out of the house. It is no shame to Ire- 
land, or her sons, that up to this they have failed in 
each attempt. Those attempts are pillars of fire in her 
history, beacons of light in the desert of Sin, where the 
Irish Israel still wanders in search of the promised land. 
Few of the peoples of Europe who to-day make up the 
Concert of Powers have, unaided, expelled the invader 
who held them down, and none has been in the situation 
of Ireland. 

As Mr. Gladstone wrote in 1890, "can anyone say we 
should have treated Ireland as we have done had she lain 
not between us and the ocean, but between us and 
Europe?'' 

In introducing the scheme of mild Home Rule termed 
the Councils Bill in 1907, Mr. Birrell prefaced it with 
the remark that "separation was unthinkable — -save in 
the event of some world cataclysm." World cataclysms 
up to this have not reached Ireland — England intervened 
to well. She has maintained her hold by sea power. The 
lonely Andromeda saw afar off the rescuing Perseus, a 
nude figure on the coast of Spain or France, but long 
ere his flight reached her rock-bound feet she beheld him 
fall, bruised, mangled, and devoured by the watching sea 
monster. 

Had Italy been placed as Ireland is, cut off from all 
external succor save across a sea held by a relentless 
jailer, would she have been to-day a free people, ally of 
Austria on terms of high equality? 

The blood shed by the founders of modern Italy would 
all have been shed in vain — that blood that sanctified the 



6o 

sword of Garabaldi — had it not been for the selfish policy 
of Louis Napoleon and the invading armies of France. 
Italy, no more than Ireland, could have shaken herself 
free had it not been for aid from abroad. The late Queen 
Victoria saw clearly the parallel, and as hereditary custo- 
dian of Ireland, Her Majesty protested against the effort 
then being made to release Italy from an Austrian prison, 
when she herself was so hard put to it to keep Ireland 
in an English jail. Writing to her Prime Minister on July 
25 th , 1 848, Her Majesty said: "The Queen must tell Lord 
John (Russel) what she has repeatedly told Lord Palmer- 
ston, but without apparent effect, that the establishment 
of an entente cordiale with the French Republic for the 
purpose of driving the Austrians out of their dominions 
in Italy would be a disgrace to this country. That the 
French would attach the greatest importance to it and 
gain the greatest advantage from it, there can be no doubt 
of. But how will England appear before the world at the 
moment she is struggling to maintain her supremacy in 
Ireland; * " and on October 10 th , following, her Majesty 
wrote to her uncle, the first King of the Belgians (who 
owed his new-minted crown to the Belgian people depriv- 
ing the Dutch sovereign of his "lawful possessions'") in 
the following memorable words: 

"Really it is quite immoral, with Ireland quivering in 
our grasp and ready to throw off her allegiance at any 
moment, for us to force Austria to give up her lawful 
possessions. What shall we say if Canada, Malta, &c, 
begin to trouble us? It hurts me terribly." (Page 237, 
Queen Victoria's letters, published by order of His Majesty, 
King Edward VII). 

It hurt Ireland much more terribly, that failure to 
throw off the hand that held her "quivering in our 
grasp," so soon to stretch her "a corpse upon the dis- 
secting table." 



6i 

Ireland has failed to win her freedom, not so much 
because she has failed to shed her blood, but because her 
situation in the world is just that unique situation I have 
sought to depict. Belonging to Europe, she has not been 
of Europe; and England with a persistency that would 
be admirable were it not so criminal in intention and 
effect, has bent all her efforts, all her vigor, an unswerv- 
ing policy and a pitiless sword to extend the limits of 
exclusion. To approach Ireland at all since the first Eng- 
lish Sovereign laid hands upon it was "quite immoral." 
When Frederick of Hohenstaufen (so long ago as that!) 
sent his secretary (an Irishman) to Ireland, we read that 
Henry III of England declared "it hurt him terribly,*' and 
ordered all the goings out and comings in of the returned 
Irish-German statesman to be closely watched. 

The dire offence of Hugh O'Neill to Elizabeth was far 
less his rebellion than his "practices" with Spain. At 
every cessation of arms during the Nine Years War he 
waged with England, she sought to obtain from him an 
abjuration of "foreign aid," chiefly " that of the Spaniard." 
"Nothing will become the traitor (O'Neill) more than his 
public confession of any Spanish practices, and his abju- 
ration of any manner of hearkening or combining with 
any foreigners." 

Could O'Neill be brought to publicly repudiate help 
from abroad it would have, the Queen thought, the effect 
that "in Spain * * * the hopes of such attempts might be 
extinguished. 

As long as the sea was open to Spain there was grave 
danger. If Spaniard and Irishman came close together 
O'Neill's offense was indeed "fit to be made vulgar" — 
all men would see the strength of combination, the weak- 
ness of isolation. 

"Send me all the news you receive from Spain for 
Tyrone doth fill all these parts with strange lies, although 



62 

some part be true, that there came some munition." It 
was because O'Neill was a statesman and knew the impe- 
rative need to Ireland of keeping in touch w r ith Europe 
that for Elizabeth he became ''the chief traitor of Ireland" 
— "a reprobate from God, reserved for the sword." 

Spain was to Elizabethan Englishman what Germany 
is to-day. 

•'I would venture to say one word here to my Irish 
fellow^ countrymen of all political persuasions. If they 
imagine they can stand politically or economically while 
Britain falls they are w r oefully mistaken. The British fleet 
is their one shield. If it be broken, Ireland will go down. 
They may well throw themselves heartily into the com- 
mon defense, for no sword can transfix England without 
the point reaching Ireland behind her." (Sir Arthur Conan 
Doyle, in the Fortnightly RevisWj February, 191 3, "Great 
Britain and the Next War.") 

The voice is a very old one, and the bogey has done 
duty for a long time in Ireland. When to-day, it is from 
Germany that freedom may be feared, Ireland is warned 
against the Germans. When, three hundred years ago 
the beacon of hope shone on the coast of Spain, it was 
the Spaniards who were the bad people of history. 

Fray Mattheo de Oviedo, who had been sent to Ireland 
as Archbishop, wrote to King Phillip III from O'Neill's 
stronghold, Dungannon, on June 24 th , 1600. We might 
be listening to the voice of the Fortnightly Review of yes- 
terday. "The English are making great efforts to bring 
about a peace, offering excellent terms, and for this pur- 
pose the Viceroy sent messengers twice to O'Neill, saying, 
among other things, that Your Majesty is making peace 
with the Queen, and that his condition will be hopeless. 
At other times he says that no greater misfortune could 
iiappen to the country than to bring Spaniards into it, 
because they are haughty and vicious and they would 



63 

destroy and ruin the country." The Irish princes were 
no fools. ■' r Uo all this they reply most honorably that they 
will hold out so long as they have one soldier or there 
remains a cow to eat." 

Hugh O'Neill saw clearly that all compromise between 
Ireland and England was futile, and that the way of es- 
cape was by complete separation and lay only through 
Europe. He again and again begged the Spanish King to 
sever Ireland and erect it into an allied State. He offered 
the crown of Ireland to a Spanish prince, just as three 
centuries earlier in 1 3 1 5 another and a great O'Neill 
offered the crown of Ireland to Edward Bruce. 

The coming of the Bruce saved Gaelic Ireland for three 
centuries. Had Phillip of Spain sent his son as King to 
Ireland, her fate had been settled then instead of remain- 
ing three centuries later to still confront European states- 
manship with an unsolved problem. 

In many letters addressed by the Irish leaders to Phil- 
lip II and Phillip III we find the constantly recurring 
note of warning that to leave England in possession of 
Ireland meant the downfall of Spain. The Irish princes 
knew that in fighting England they were in truth fighting 
the battle of European civilization. 

Writing to Phillip II from Lifford. on May i6 rh , 1596, 
O'Neill and O'Donnel drew the King's attention to the 
cause of Ireland as the cause of Europe, and in the name 
of Ireland offered the crown to a Spanish Prince. "But 
inasmuch as we have felt, to our great and indescribable 
harm the evildoings and crimes of those whom the Queen 
of England is in the habit of sending amongst us, we beg 
and beseech Your Majesty to send someone well known 
to you and perfectly fit to be the King of this island, for 
his own welfare. f ours. and that of the Christian State"' 
(Christendom). 



6 4 

They asked for a Prince "who will not be unwilling 
to rule over and live amongst us and to direct and guide 
our nation well and wisely. " They pointed out how "he 
will obtain much advantage and glory by so doing," and 
finally they begged "would that your Majesty would 
appoint the Archduke of Austria, now Governor of Flan- 
ders, a famous man and worthy of all praise, than whom 
none would be more acceptable." (The original is in 
Latin in the archives of Simancas.) 

No more statesmanlike appeal was ever made from 
Ireland ; and had the Archduke of Austria assumed the 
crown of Ireland in 1569, "now or never" would indeed 
have become "now and forever." Had Phillip II carried 
out his often repeated promises of sending aid to that 
country the fate of his own kingdom must have been a 
very different one. 

"I wish it were possible for me, by word of mouth, 
to show the importance of this undertaking and the great 
service that would be rendered thereby to God and His 
Church, and the great advantage it would he to the service 
of Your Majesty and the peace of your States to attack the 
enemy here. " 

So wrote, in 1600, to Phillip III, the Archbishop of 
Dublin, already quoted Mattheo de Oviedo. 

This prelate had been specially sent to Ireland "to see 
and understand the state of the country misrepresented 
by English emissaries at foreign courts." 

The wrath of Elizabeth against O'Neill was largely 
due to his keeping in touch with the Continent, whereby 
the lies of her agents abroad were turned to her own 
ridicule. To Essex, her viceroy, she wrote: "Tyrone 
hath blazed in foreign parts the defeat of regiments, the 
death of captains, and loss of men of quality in every 
quarter." 



65 

O'Neill, not only for years beat her Generals in the 
field, he beat herself and her councillors at their own 
game. To Essex, in an ecstacy of rage at the loss of the 
last great army sent, she wrote (September 17 th , 1599): 
"To trust this traitor upon oath is to trust the devil upon 
his religion. Only this we are sure (for we see it in effect), 
that you have prospered so ill for us by your warfare, as 
we cannot but be very jealous lest we should be as well 
overtaken by the treaty.'" 

(Essex wished to bring O'Neill in by a treaty which, 
while ostensibly conceding the terms of the Irish Prince, 
was to allow the Queen time to carry out her pur- 
pose.) 

The Irish Princes knew Elizabeth and her Ministers, 
as well as she read Essex. "Believe no news from Eng- 
land of any agreement in this country," they had written 
to Phillip II in 1597, "great offers have been made by 
the Queen of England, but we will not break our oath 
and promise to you.'" In a letter written a year earlier 
(October 16 th , 1596), replying by the special envoy sent 
by the King, they said: "Since the former envoys left 
us we have used every means in our power, as we prom- 
ised we should do, to gain time and procrastination 
from one day to another. * * * But how could we impose 
on so clever an enemy, so skilled in every kind of cun- 
ning and cheating if we did not use much dissimulation, 
and especially if we did not pretend we were anxious for 
peace? We will keep firm and unshaken the promises 
which we made to Your Majesty with our last breath; 
if we do not we shall incur at once the wrath of God and 
the contempt of men.'* 

How faithfully they kept those promises and how the 
Spanish King failed in his, their fate and the bitter ruin 
of their country shows. That men fighting for Ireland, 
had to meet Elizabeth and her statesmen with something 



66 

of her own cunning is made very clear to anyone reading 
the English State papers in Ireland. 

Essex, in one of his "answers," wrote: "I advise Her 
Majesty to allow me, at my return to Dublin, to conclude 
this treaty, yealding some of their grants in the present : 
and when Her Majesty has made secret preparations to 
enable me to prosecute, I will find quarrels enough to 
break and give them a deadly blow/' 

The Irish, however, failed in this contest. They were 
not sufficiently good liars, and lacked the higher flights 
of villainy necessary to sustain the encounter. The essen- 
tial English in Tudor days, and much later, for admin- 
istering a deadly blow to an Irish patriot was "assassi- 
nation.'* Poison frequently took the place of the knife, 
and was often administered wrapt in a leaf of the British 
Bible. A certain Atkinson, knowing the religious nature 
of Cecil, the Queen's Prime Minister, the founder of a 
long line of statesmen foremost as champions of Church 
and Book, suggested the getting rid of O'Neill by some 
"poisoned hosts." This proposal to use the Blessed Sa- 
crament as a veritable Last Supper for the last great Irish 
chief remains on record, endorsed by Cecil. 

Another Briton, named Annyas, was charged to poison 
" the most dangerous and open rebel in Minister," Florence 
MacCarthy More, the great MacCarthy. Elizabeth's Prime 
Minister piously endorsed the deed — "though his soul 
never had the thought to consent to the poisoning of a 
dog, much less a Christian." 

The fundamental characteristics of the two peoples, 
English and Irish , were perhaps never more sharply brought 
into contrast than in some of these measures adopted by 
an English Queen and her Ministers to get rid of an Irish 
enemy. The Earl of Ormonde, the Queen suggested, might 
aid one of her projects for getting rid of Shane O'Neill. 
Ormonde, although the head of an Anglo-Irish house, con- 



67 

spicuous for its loyalty to the Crown, had four centuries 
of Irish chivalry in his veins. His reply is on record, and 
as a warrant of Irish honor, it stands beside Burghley's 
warrant to his English poisoner. " The clausein the Queen's 
letter seems most strange to me. I will never use treach- 
ery to any, for it will both touch Her Highness \s honor 
too much, and mine own credit; and whosoever gave the 
Queen advice thus to write to me is fitter to execute such 
base services than I am." The Irish blood will out — even 
in a butler. 

To Care w, the President of Minister, Cecil wrote enjoin- 
ing the assassination of the young Earl of Desmond, then 
•'in the keeping of Carew" : " Whatever you do to abridge 
him out of Providence shall never be imputed to you for 
a fault, but exceedingly commended by the Queen." After 
this, we are not surprised to learn that in her instructions to 
Mountjoy, the successor of Essex, the Queen " recommended 
to his special care to preserve the true exercise of 
religion among her loving subjects." As O'Neill was still 
in the field with a large army, she prudently pointed out, 
however, that the time "did not permit that he should 
intermeddle by any severity or violence in matters of 
religion until her power was better established there to 
countenounce his action." That the character of their 
adversary was faithfully appreciated by contemporary Irish 
opinion stands plain in a letter written by James Fitz- 
thomas, nephew of the Great Earl Gerald of Desmond, to 
Phillip II. "The government of the English is such as 
Pharaoh himself never used the like ; for they content not 
themselves with all temporal prosperity, but by cruelty 
desire our blood and perpetual destruction, to blot out 
the whole remembrance of our posterity * * * for that Nero, 
in his time, was far inferior to that Queen in cruelty." 

The Irish chiefs well sustained their part in meeting 
this combination of power and perfidy, and merited, on 



68 

the highest grounds of policy the help so often promised 
by the King of Spain. They showed him not only by 
their valor on the field but by their sagacious council 
how great a part was reserved for Ireland in the affairs 
of Europe if he would but profit from it and do his part. 

In this the Spanish King failed. Phillip II had died in 
1598, too immersed in religious trials to see that the centre 
of his griefs was pivoted on the possession of Ireland by 
the female Nero. With his son and successor communi- 
cation was maintained and in a letter of Phillip III to 
O'Neill, dated from Madrid. December 24 th , 1599, we 
read: "Noble and well-beloved, I have already written 
a joint letter to you and your relative O'Donnell. in which 
I replied to a letter of both of you. By this, which I 
now write to you personally, I wish to let you know my 
goodwill towards you, and I mean, to prove it. not only 
by word, but by deed." That promise was not fulfilled, 
or so inadequately fulfilled, that the help, when it came, 
was insufficient to meet the needs of the case. 

History tells us what the sad consequences were to the 
cause of civilization in Ireland, from the failure of the 
Spanish King to realize the greatness of his responsibili- 
ties. But the evil struck deeper than to Ireland alone. 
Europe lost more than her historians have yet realized 
from the weakness of purpose that let Ireland go down 
transfixed by the sword of Elizabeth. 

Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a 
Hohenzollern, instead of by a Habsburg Spaniard, how 
different might have been the future of the world ! 

Although Europe has forgotten Ireland, Ireland has 
never forgotten Europe. Natural outpost and sentinel of 
that Continent in the West, for three hundred years now 
gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of her last 
native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Phil- 
lip HI, if an outcast from European civilization none the 



6 9 

less rejecting the insular tradition of England, as she has 
rejected her insular Church. And now once more in her 
career she turns to the greatest of European sovereigns, 
to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the most 
faithful of European peoples. Ireland already has given 
and owes much to Germany. In the dark ages intercourse 
between the Celtic people of the West and the Rhinelands 
and Bavaria was close and long sustained. Irish monas- 
teries flourished in the heart of Germany, and German 
architecture gave its note possibly to some of the fairest 
cathedral churches in Ireland. 

Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps, among the most con- 
spicuous examples of the influence of that old time inter- 
course with Germany. To-day, when little of her past 
remains to venerate, her ancient language on what seemed 
its bed of death owes much of its present day revival to 
German scholarship and culture. Probably the foremost 
Gaelic scholar of the day is the occupant of the Chair of 
Celtic at Berlin University, and Ireland recognizes with 
a gratitude she is not easily able to express, all that her 
ancient literature owes to the genius and loving intellect 
of Dr. Kuno Meyer. 

The name of Ireland may be unknown on the Bourses 
or in the Chancelleries of Europe ; it is not without inter- 
est, even fame, in the centres of German academical cul- 
ture. But that the German State may also be interested 
in the political fate of Ireland is believed by the present 
writer. He knows something of the greatness of soul of 
her ruler, of his breadth of view and of the part he de- 
signs, under God, the German people to play in the future 
of mankind. The task of freeing Ireland and of restoring 
that exiled island to the current of European life is one 
worthy of the greatness and strength of the German Kai- 
ser and his people. Where the Kings of Spain, in vary- 
ing measure promised help and failed to give it. where 



•jo 

Louis XIV and Napoleon planned but failed to achieve, 
a German Empire at war with England cannot be mis- 
directed as they were. The contention of Ireland so often 
put before those monarchs, that England, to be beaten, 
must be driven out of Ireland, will not be laid in vain 
before the greater brains and mightier purpose that con- 
trol the vaster armaments of Germany. 

Maurice Fitzgerald, the outlawed claimant to the Earl- 
dom of Desmond, wrote to Phillip II from Lisbon on Sep- 
tember 4 th , 1593: 

"We have thought it right to implore your Majesty to 
send the aid you will think fit and with it to send us 
(the Irish refuges in the Peninsula) to defend and uphold 
the same undertaking; for we hope, with God's help, your 
Majesty will be victorious and conquer and hold as your 
own the Kingdom of Ireland * * We trust in God that 
Your Majesty and the Council will weigh well the ad- 
vantages that will ensue to Christendom from this enter- 
prise * * * since the opportunity is so good and the cause 
so just and weighty, and the undertaking so easily com- 
pleted.'" 

The task was easy of accomplishment in Tudor days ; 
to-day it will be the first test of Imperial sovereignty 
in Europe; a task that will tax the greatness of a great 
people, the genius of their statesmanship, the intelligence 
of their ruler, but one that will infinitely repay the labor 
of accomplishment. 

The task of Ireland is to prepare for the coming of the 
German. No people can expect freedom except through sacri- 
fice. Our young men and women, our boys and girls, must be 
taught the part Germany is destined to play in the affairs 
of the world, and must be trained to know their duty 
when the day of trial comes. The history of human free- 
dom is written in letters of blood. It is the law of God. 
No people who clutch at safety, who shun death are 



7i 

worthy of freedom. It was not by Act of Parliament or 
gift of the hater that Aodh O'Neill sought to win free- 
dom for Ireland. Nay, rather will Irish liberty come as 
the gift of the halter. 

The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men 
in a free Ireland. The rest is cattle. Freedom is kept 
alive in man's blood only by shedding of that blood. It 
was not an act of a foreign Parliament they were seek- 
ing, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and 
young men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the 
English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. 
Then, if ever. Irishmen might have run from a victorious 
and pitiless enemy who, having captured the French 
General and murdered in cold blood the seven hundred 
Killala peasants who were with his colors, were now 
come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last 
stronghold of Irish rebellion. 

The ill led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen 
in Ireland to stand in pitched fight for their country's 
freedom, went to meet the army of England, as the Pro- 
testant Bishop, who saw them, says: "running upon death 
with as little appearance of reflection or concern as if 
they were hastening to a show." 

The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her 
uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abort- 
ive rising of fifty years later in 1848: 

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in 
Ireland, and I think it is very likely to go off without 
anv contest which people (and I think rightly), rather 
regret. The Irish should receive A GOOD LESSON OR 
THEY WILL BEGIN AGAIN/' (Page 223, Vol. II., 
Queen Victoria's Letters). Her Majesty was profoundly 
right. Ireland needed that lesson in 1848, as she needs 
it still more to-day. Had Irishmen died in 1848 as they 
did in 1 798 Ireland to-day would be fifty years nearer to 



72 

freedom. It is because a century has passed since Europe 
saw Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has for- 
gotten that she lives. 

As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever 
on Germany so shall I end it here with a remark of Lever 
on his own country, Ireland. 

In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph 
of Europe on the grave of a generation who believed that 
"no human cause was worth the shedding one drop of 
human blood." 

"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing to 
the late cowardice and poltroonery of the patriots. Even 
Italians can fight." (Letter of C. Lever from Florence, 
August 19 th , 1848.) 

It is only the truth that wounds. It is that repronch 
that has cursed Ireland for a century. 

Sedition, the natural garment for an Irishman to wear, 
has been for a hundred years a bloodless sedition. It is 
this fiery shirt of Nessus that has driven our strong men 
mad. How to shed our blood with honor, how to give 
our lives for Ireland — that has been, that is the problem 
of Irish nationality. 

The day the first German comrade lands in Ireland, 
the day the first German warship is seen proudly breast- 
ing the waves of the Irish Sea with the flag of Ireland 
at her fore, that day many Irishmen must die, but they 
shall die in the sure peace of God that Ireland may live. 



Part VI. 

(Written in November-December, 19 13.) 

It would be idle to attempt to forecast the details of a 
struggle between Great Britain and Germany. That is a 
task that belongs to the War Departments of the two 
States. I have assigned myself merely to point out that 
such a struggle is inevitable, and to indicate what I be- 
lieve to be the supreme factors in the conilict and how 
one of these, Ireland, and that undoubtedly the most im- 
portant factor has been overlooked by practically every 
predecessor of Germany in the effort to make good at 
sea. The Spaniards in Elizabeth's reign, the French of 
Louis XIV and of the Directory took some steps, it is true, 
to challenge England's control of Ireland, but instead of 
concentrating their strength upon that line of attack they 
were content to dissipate it in isolated expeditions and 
never once to push home the assault on the one point that 
was so obviously the key to the enemy's whole position. 
At any period during the last three centuries, with Ireland 
gone, England was, if not actually at the mercy of her 
assailants, certainly reduced to impotency beyond her own 
shores. But while England knew the value to herself of 
Ireland, she appreciated to the full the fact that this pro- 
fitable juxtaposition lay on her right side, hidden from 
the eyes of Europe. 

"Will anyone assert," said Gladstone, "that we would 
have dared to treat Ireland as we have done had she lain, 
not between us and the ocean, but between us and the 
Continent?" And while the bulk of England, swollen to 
enormous dimensions by the gains she drew from Ireland, 
interposed between her victim and Europe, her Continen- 
tal adversaries were themselves the victims of that strange 
mental disease psychologists term the collective illusion. 
All the world saw that which, in fact, did not exist. The 



74 

greatness of England, as they beheld it. imposing, power- 
ful and triumphant, existed not on the rocky base they 
believed they saw, but on the object, sacked, impoverished 
and bled, they never saw. And so it is to-day. The 
British Empire is the great illusion. Resembling in much 
the Holy Roman Empire it is not British, it is not an 
Empire, and assuredly it is not holy. It lives on the life- 
blood and sufferings of some, on the sufferance and mu- 
tual jealousy of others, and on the fixed illusion of all. 
Rather is it a great Mendicity Institute. England now, 
instead of ''robbing from Pole to Pole," as John Mitchel 
once defined her activities, goes begging from Pole to Pole, 
that all and everyone shall give her a helping hand to 
keep the plunder. Chins, Goorkhas, Sikhs, Malays, Irish, 
Chinese, South African Dutch, Australasians, Maoris, Ca- 
nadians, Japanese, and finally "Uncle Sam" — these are 
the main components that when skilfully mixed from 
London, furnish the coloring material for the world-wide 
canvas. If we take away India, Egypt, and the other col- 
ored races, the white population that remains is greatly 
inferior to the population of Germany, and instead of 
being a compact, indivisible whole, consists of a number 
of widely scattered and separated communities, each with 
separate and absorbing problems of its own, and more 
than one of them British neither in race, speech, nor af- 
fection. 

Moreover, if we turn to the colored races we find that 
the great mass of the subjects of this Empire have less 
rights within it than they possess outside its boundaries, 
and occupy there a lower status than accorded to most 
foreigners. 

The people of India far outnumber all other citizens of 
the British Empire put together, and yet we find the 
British Indians resident in Canada, to take but one in- 
stance, petitioning the Imperial Government in 1910 for 



75 

as favorable terms of entry into that British possession 
as the Japanese enjoyed. 

They pointed out that a Japanese could enter Canada 
on showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, 
but that no British Indian could land unless he had forty 
pounds and had come direct from India — a physical im- 
possibility, since no direct communication exists. But 
they went further, for they showed that their "citizenship" 
of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign 
State anywhere imposed upon them. 

"We appeal,"' they said, "and most forcibly bring to 
your notice that no such discriminating laws are existing 
against us in foreign countries like the United States of 
America, Germany, Japan, and Africa, to whom Ave do 
not owe any allegiance whatsoever." 

So that outside its white or European races it is clear 
the Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, 
far from being one, it is more divided racially against 
itself than are even opposing Asiatic and European na- 
tions which have the good fortune not to be united in a 
common imperial bond. 

The total white population of this incongruous mass 
in 191 1 consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings 
made up of various national and racial strains, as against 
66,000,000 of white men in the German Empire, the vast 
majority of them of German blood. And while the latter 
form a disciplined, self-contained, and self-supporting and 
self - defending whole, the former are swelled by Irish. 
French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans who, accord- 
ing to Sir R. Edgcumbe, must be reckoned as " colored." 

It is one thing to paint the map red, but you must be 
sure that your colors are fast and that the stock of paints 
won't run out. England apart from her other perplexities 
is now faced with this prospect. Great Britain can no 
longer count on Ireland, that most prolilix source of 



/6 

supply of her army, navy, and industrial efforts during 
the last century, while she is faced with a declining 
birth-rate, due largely, be it noted, to the diminished 
influx of the Irish, a more prolific and virile race. While 
her internal powers of reproduction are failing, her ability 
to keep those already born is diminishing still more 
rapidly. Emigration threatens to remove the surplus of 
births over deaths. 

As long as it was only the population of Ireland that 
fell (8,500,000 in 1846 to 4,370,000 in 191 1), Great 
Britain was not merely untroubled but actually rejoiced 
at a decrease in numbers that made the Irish more man- 
ageable, and yet just sufficiently starvable to supply her 
Avith a goodly surplus for army, navy, and industrial ex- 
pansion in Great Britain. Now that the Irish are gone 
with a vengeance it is being perceived that they did not 
take their vengeance with them and that the very indus- 
trial expansion they built up from their starving bodies 
and naked limbs contains within itself the seeds of a 
great retribution. 

" Since Free Trade has ruined our agriculture, our army 
has become composed of starving slum dwellers who, 
according to the German notion, are better at shouting 
than at fighting. German generals have pointed out that 
in the South African War our regular and auxiliary troops 
often raised the white flag and surrendered, without neces- 
sity, sometimes to a few Boers, and they may do the 
same to a German invading force. Free Trade which 
'benefits the consumer' and the capitalist has, unfortu- 
nately, through the destruction of our agriculture and 
through forcing practically the whole population of Great 
Britain into the towns, destroyed the manhood of the na- 
tion. " ? (Modern Germany, page 251, by J. Ellis Barker, 
1 907). An army of slum dwellers is a poor base on which 
to build the structure of a perpetual world dominion. 



77 

While the navy shows an imposing output of new- 
battleships and cruisers for 1 9 1 3, the record, we are told, 
of all warship construction in the w r orld, it takes blood 
as well as iron to cement empires. Battleships may be- 
come so much floating scrap iron (like the Russian fleet 
at Tsushima), if the men behind the guns lack the right 
stamina and education. 

We learn, too, that it is not only the slum dwellers 
who are failing, but that to meet the shortage of officers 
a large number of transfers from the Merchant Marine to 
the Royal Navy are being sanctioned. To this must be 
added the call of the Great Dominions for men and officers 
to man their local fleets. As the vital resources of Eng- 
land become more and more inadequate to meet the men- 
ace of German naval and moral strength, she turns her 
eyes to Ireland, and we learn from the London Daily Tele- 
graph that Mr. Churchill's scheme of recruiting at Queens- 
town may furnish "matter for congratulation, as Irish 
boys make excellent bluejackets, happy of disposition, 
amenable to discipline and extremely quick and handy." 

As I can recall an article in this same journal, written 
during the course of the Boer War, in which Ireland was 
likened to a " serpent whose head must be crushed beneath 
the heel," the Daily Telegraph's praise to-day of the Irish 
disposition should leave Irish boys profoundly unmoved 
— and still ashore. 

There is yet another aspect of the growing stream of 
British emigration. "Death removes the feeble, emi- 
gration removes the strong. Canada, New Zealand, Aus- 
tralia, and South Africa, have no use for the sick and 
palsied, or for those incapable of work through age or 
youth. They want the workers, and they get them. 
Those who have left the United Kingdom during 1 9 1 2 
arc not the scum of our islands, but the very pick. And 
they leave behind, for our politicians to grapple with, a 



greater proportion of females, of children . and of disabled 
than ever before." (London Magazine.) 

The excess of females over males, already so note- 
worthy a feature of England's decay, becomes each year 
more accentuated and doubtless accounts for the strenu- 
ous efforts now being made to entrap Irish boys into the 
British army and navy. 

If we compare the figures for Germany and Great 
Britain, and then contrast them with those for Ireland, 
we shall see, at a glance, how low England is sink- 
ing, and how vitally necessary it is for her to redress 
the balance of her own excess of '•militants" over males 
by kidnapping Irish youths into her emasculated services, 
and by fomenting French and Russian enmities against 
the fruitful German people. 

Germany 1 9 1 o: Males 32,031 ,96 7 ; females, 32,871,456; 
total. 64.925,993. Excess of females, 739,489. 

Great Britain, 1 9 1 1 : 

England and Wales: Males, 17,448,476; females, 
18.626,793; total. 36.075,269. Excess of females, 
1. 178. 317. 

Scotland: Males, 2.307,603; females, 2.451.842; total. 
4,759.445. Excess of fermales. 144,239. 

Total for Great Britain. 40.834,7 1 4. Excess of females, 

i-3 22 -55 6 - 

Thus. on a population much less than two-thirds that 
of Germany. Great Britain has almost twice as many 
females in excess over males as Germany has, and this 
disproportion of sexes tends yearly to increase. We read 
in every fresh return of emigration that it is men and not 
women who are leaving England and Scotland. That Irish 
emigration, appalling as its ravages have been since 1 846, 
is still maintained on a nationally healthier basis the sex 
returns for 191 1 make clear. The figures for Ireland at 
the census were as follows: 



79 

Ireland: Males. 2.186,802; females. 2. 195. 14 7; total. 
4.381,951. Excess of females, 8,346. 

Ireland, it is seen, can still spare 100,000 or 150,000 
males for the British armed forces and be in no un- 
healthier sex plight than Scotland or England is in. It 
is to get this surplus of stout Irish brawn and muscle 
that Mr. Churchill and the British War Office are now 
touting in Ireland. 

I take the following Government advertisement from 
the Cork Evening Echo (of March. 19 13), in illustration: 

"NOTICE— Any person that brings a recruit for the 
Regular or Special Reserve Branches of the Army to the 
Recruiting Officer at Victoria Barracks, Cork, will be paid 
the money reward allowed for each recruit, which ranges 
from is. 6d. to 5s. each/' 

From whatever point of view we survey it we shall 
find that England's Empire at bottom rests upon Ireland, 
and requires the continued exploitation of Ireland to make 
good British deficiencies. The Dominions are far off, and 
while they may give battleships, they take men. Ireland 
is close at hand — she gives all and takes nothing. Men, 
mind, food, and money — all these she has offered through 
the centuries, and it is upon these and the unrestricted 
drain of these four things from that rich mine of human 
fertility and wealth, that the British Empire has been 
founded and maintained. To secure to-day the goodwill 
and active co-operation of the Irish race abroad as well 
as in Ireland, and through that goodwill to secure the 
Alliance and support of the United States has become the 
guiding purpose of British statesmanship. 

The Home Rule Bill of the present Liberal Govern- 
ment is merely the petty party expression of what all 
English statesmen recognize as a national need. Were the 
present Liberal Government thrown out to-morrow their 
Unionist successors would hasten to bind Ireland (and 



8o 

America) to them by a measure that, if necessary, would 
go much farther. Every Unionist knows this. Ireland is 
always the key to the situation. 

I will quote two pronouncements, one English and one 
American, to show that Home Rule has now become an 
Imperial necessity for England. 

Speaking in the House of Lords on the Home Rule Bill, 
Earl Grey, the late Governor General of Canada, said on 
January 27 th , 191 3 : 

"In the interests of the Empire I feel very strongly 
that it is imperative that the Irish question should be 
settled on lines which will satisfy the sentiment of the 
over-sea democracies, both in our self-governing colonies 
and in the United States. Every one. I think, will agree 
that it is most important and in the highest interests of 
the Empire that there should be the friendliest feelings 
of generous affection and goodwill, not only between the 
self-governing Dominions and the Motherland, but also 
between America and England *. I need not elaborate 
this point. We are all agreed upon it. A heavy shadow 
at present exists, and it arises from our treatment of Ire- 
land * * *. If this be so, is it not our duty to remove the 
obstacle that prevents relationship with America from 
being that which we all desire?" 

The American utterance came from one equally re- 
presentative of American imperial interests. It is that of 
Mr. Roosevelt, published in the Irish World, of New York, 
February 8 th , 191 3: 

"I feel that the enactment into law of this measure * 
bids fair to establish goodwill among the English-speak- 
ing peoples. This has been prevented more than by any 
other one thing by this unhappy feud that has raged for 
centuries, and the settlement of which, I most earnestly 
hope and believe will be a powerful contribution to the 
peace of the world, based on international justice and 



Si 

goodwill. I earnestly feel that the measure is as much in 
the interests of Great Britain a»s of Ireland." 

Did we judge of Ireland only by many of the public 
utterances made in her name, then indeed, might we 
despair of a people who. having suffered so much and so 
valiantly resisted for so many centuries were now to be 
won to their oppressor's side by, perhaps, the most bare- 
faced act of bribery ever attempted by a government 
against a people. 

"Injured nations cannot so entireley forgive their ene- 
mies without losing something of their virility, and it 
grates upon me to hear leader after leader of the Parlia- 
mentary Party declaring without shame, that Home Rule 
when it is won for Ireland is to be used as a new wea- 
pon of offense in England's hands against the freedom 
of the world elsewhere." 

Did the Irish Parliamentary Party indeed represent 
Ireland in this, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's noble protest in his 
recent work "The Land War in Ireland," would stand 
for the contemptuous impeachment, not of a political 
party but of a nation. 

Mr. Redmond, in his latest speech, shows how truly 
3Ir. Blunt has depicted his party's aim: but to the credit 
of Ireland it is to be recorded that Mr. Redmond had to 
choose not Ireland, but England for its delivery. Speaking 
at the St. Patrick's Day dinner in London on March, i 7, 
191 3, Mr. Redmond, to a non-Irish audience, thus hailed 
the future part his country is to play under the restoration 
of what he describes as a "National Parliament." 

"We will, under Home Rule, devote our attention to 
education, reform of the poor law, and questions of that 
kind which are purely domestic, which are, if you like, 
hum-drum Irish questions, and the only way in which 
we will attempt to interfere in any imperial question 
will be by our representatives on the floor of the Imperial 



82 

Parliament in Westminister, doing everything in our power 
to increase the strength and the glory of what will then be our 
Empire at long last; and by sending in support of the Em- 
pire the strong arms and brace hearts of Irish soldiers and 
Irish sailo7'S, to maintain the tradition of Irish valor in every 
part of the world. That is our ambition." 

Were this, indeed, the ambition of Ireland, did this 
represent the true feeling of Irishmen towards England, 
and the Empire of England, then Home Rule, on such 
terms, would be a curse and a crime. Thierry, the French 
historian, is a truer exponent of the passionate aspirations 
of the Irish heart than anyone who to-day would seek to 
represent Ireland as willing to sell her soul no less than 
the strong arms and brave hearts of her sons in an un- 
holy cause. 

"*** for notwithstanding the mixture of races, the 
inter-communion of every kind brought about by the 
course of centuries, hatred of the English Government 
still subsists as a native passion in the mass of the Irish 
nation. Ever since the hour of invasion this race of men 
has invariably desired that which their conquerors did 
not desire, detested that which they liked, and liked that 
which they detested * * *. This indomitable persistency, 
this faculty of preserving through centuries of misery 
the remembrance of lost liberty, and of never despairing 
of a cause always defeated, always fatal to those who 
dared to defend it, is perhaps the strangest and noblest 
example ever given by any nation." (Histoire de la Con- 
quete de V Angleterre par les Normands, Paris edition, l 846, 
London, 1891.) 

The French writer here saw deeper and spoke truer 
than many who seek to-day not to reveal the Irish heart, 
whose deep purpose they have forgotten, but to barter 
its life-blood for a concession that could be won to-morrow 
bv half that blood if shed at home, thus offered without 



83 

warrant "as a new weapon of offence in England's hands 
against the freedom of the world elsewhere/' 

The Irishman, who in the belief that Home Rule has 
come or that any measure of Home Rule the London 
Parliament will offer can be a substitute for his country's 
freedom, joins the British army or navy is a voluntary 
traitor to his country. His place is to prepare for the coming 
of the German. His place is to see that when a victorious 
Germany severs Ireland from her hereditary exploiter the 
difficulties of settlement shall be resolutely faced by a 
people determined to justify the freedom conferred upon 
them. Even were Germany all that Englishmen paint 
her and Irishmen only to change "owners," the change 
could not but be beneficial to Ireland. Germany took 
Alsace-Lorraine by force from France in 1870, and has 
governed those provinces for forty years by what is 
termed "brute force" and against the will of the majority. 
Yet forty years of German "tyranny" have brought 
extraordinary prosperity. Strassburg, a mean, pent-in 
garrison town under France, has become a great and 
beautiful city under the Germans, and the population of 
the whole annexed territory has greatly increased in the 
period. Ireland in the same forty years of English civi- 
lization has lost nearly one-fifth of her population. Her 
pauper rate, her lunacy rate, her sick rate — consumption 
particulary- — have all gone up ; her vitality has gone down. 
Her ports, save one, lie idle; her rivers empty. Every 
way out lies only through and across Britain. 

Almost everything that Ireland produces, or consumes, 
must all go out or come in solely through England and 
on payment of a transit and shipping tax to English 
trade. 

The London press has lately waxed indignant over 
Servia denied by Austria a port on the Adriatic, and we 
have been told that a Servia without a port is a Servia 



34 

held in ''economic slavery," and that her independence 
is illusory unless she have free outlet to the sea. But 
what of Ireland? With not one, but forty ports, the finest 
in all Western Europe, they lie idle and empty. With 
over a thousand miles of seaboard, facing the west and 
holding the seaway between Europe and America, Ireland, 
in the grip of England, has been reduced to an economic 
slavery that has no parallel in civilization. 

And it is to this island, to this people that the appeal 
is now made that we should distrust the Germans and 
aid our enslavers! Better far, were that the only outcome, 
the fate of Alsace-Lorraine (who got their Home rule Par- 
liament years ago), than the ''friendship" of England. 
We have survived the open hate, the prolonged enslave- 
ment, the secular robbery of England and now that Eng- 
land smiles and offers us with one hand "Home Rule" to 
take it away with the other, are we going to forget the 
experience of our forefathers? A Connacht proverb of the 
Middle Ages should come back to us — "three things for 
a man to avoid: the heels of a horse, the horns of a bull, 
and the smile of an Englishman!" 

That Ireland must be involved in any war that Great 
Britain undertakes, goes without saying; but that we 
should willingly throw ourselves into the fray on the 
wrong side to avert a British defeat, is the counsel of 
traitors offered to fools. Our part may be at first a passive 
one, or we may be able to make it something more, but 
the day a German squadron holds the Irish Sea and com- 
munication with Great Britain is cut off, that day shall 
be the first day of Irish freedom, and the first day of 
freedom on the seas for Europe. 

We must see to it that the day Germany strikes, Ire- 
land shall be there. We must see to it that what was 
written only a few years ago by a member of the German 
General Staff shall not be falsified by any act of recreancy 



35 

of ours: "Of the Second Army Corps (of the British army) 
two divisions and one brigade of cavalry are quartered 
in Ireland, of which at any rate the larger part will re- 
main there in order to prevent a rising of the Irish to 
whom the German invasion would bring the liberty they 
long for." (Von Edelsheim, in his pamphlet Operationen 
u\>er See.) 

We must see to it that what Thierry wrote of our 
fathers is not shamefully belied by their sons. Our "in- 
domitable persistency" has up to this excelled and 
subdued the unvarying will applied to one unvarying 
purpose of those who, by dint of that quality, have else- 
where subjugated the Universe. We who have preserved 
through centuries of misery, the remembrance of lost 
liberty, are not now going to merge our unconquered 
souls in the base body of our oppressor. 

One of the few liberal statesmen England has produced, 
certainly the only liberal politician she has ever produced, 
the late Mr. Gladstone, compared the Union between Great 
Britain and Ireland to "the union between the mangled 
corpse of Hector and the headlong chariot of Achilles." 
(1890.) 

But, while I cannot admit that England is an Achilles, 
save, perhaps, that she may be wounded like him in the 
heel, I will not admit, I will not own that Ireland, how- 
ever mangled, however "the plowers have ploughed upon 
her back and made long furrows,'* is in truth dead, is 
indeed a corpse. No ; there is a juster analogy, and one 
given us by the only Englishman who was in every clime 
and in every circumstance a Liberal; one who died 
fighting in the cause of liberty even as in life he sang it. 
Byron denounced the Union between England and Ireland 
as "the union of the shark with its prey." 

Ireland has been swallowed by the shark, but she lias 
jiot been digested, she has not yet been assimilated. By- 



86 

ron's analogy admits of hope and admits also (as science 
shows us) of that outlet of escape and retribution Edmund 
Spenser foresaw with dread nearly three centuries earlier. 
Although swallowed, Ireland may be reserved "in this 
unquiet state still for some secret scourge which shall by 
her come unto" the swallower. We need not go to the 
poets for the end of the story. Natural history furnishes 
the sequel. The shark sometimes swallows the wrong 
fish and the greatest of English naturalists tells us what 
has been observed to follow. 

Describing the Brazilian sea fish, Diodon, which he 
had noticed off Bahia in the course of his voyage, Darwin 
says: "I have heard from Doctor Allen of Forres, that 
he has frequently found a Diodon floating alive and dis- 
tended in the stomach of the shark, and that on several 
occasions he had known it to eat its way, not only through 
the coats of the stomach, but through the sides of the 
monster, which has thus been killed. Who would ever 
have imagined that a little soft fish could have destroyed 
the great and savage shark?" 

May it be found when German Science begins its great 
voyage for the freeing of the seas that the Irish Diodon 
was indeed the wrong fish for the World Shark to swallow ! 



Part VII. 

(Written January, 19 14.) 

Every man born in Ireland holds a "hereditary brief" 
for the opponents of English sway, wherever they may 
be. The tribunal of history in his own land is closed to 
him; he must appeal to another Court; he must seek the 
ear of those who make history elsewhere. The Irishman 
is denied the right of having a history, as he is denied 
the right of having a country. He must recover both. 
For him there is to be no past, any more than a future. 
And if he seeks the record of his race in the only schools 
or books open to him he will find that hope has been 
shut out of the school and fame taken out of the story. 

The late John Richard Green, one of the greatest of Eng- 
lish historians was attracted to Ireland by a noble sym- 
pathy for the fallen he shared with very few of his 
countrymen. We are told that he sympathised with the 
spirit of Irish nationality. 

"A State," he would say, "is accidental; it can be 
made or unmade ; but a nation is something real which 
can be neither made or destroyed." 

He had once planned a history of Ireland, "but aband- 
oned the idea because the continuous record of misery 
andmisgovernmentwas too painful to contemplate." "The 
wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be 
told." All pleasure lies in contrast. The history of Ireland 
offers no contrast ; it is a tale of unmitigated wrong. 

It is too full of graves, and the ghosts are not laid yet. 
As well write the history of a churchyard. Forty years 
before John Richard Green thus explained why he had 
abandoned the plan of the graveyard, Victor Hugo lashed 
the front of England with this very thong. "Ireland 
turned into a cemetery; Poland transported to Siberia; 



88 

all Italy a galleys — there is where we stand in this month 
of November 1831!" 

The history of Ireland remains to be written, because 
the purpose of Ireland remains yet to be achieved. The 
widow of John Richard Green has laid the foundations 
of that temple of hope in which the youth of Ireland 
must enter and be sworn to the task that yet remains 
for Irishmen to accomplish. 

And so in these opening days of 19 14 I bring, with a 
message of hope, these scattered thoughts upon the 
British Empire and its approaching dissolution to lay 
before the youth of Ireland. I say approaching dissolution 
advisedly, for the signs are there to be read. "Home 
Rule" will not save it. The attempt now being made to 
bribe Ireland and the Greater Ireland beyond the seas, 
to the side of the Elsewhere Empire by what has been 
aptly termed a ticket-of-leave bill will not suffice. The 
issue lies in stronger hands. Even could the two Irelands 
be won by the dole now offered of a subordinate Parlia- 
ment in Dublin, its hands tied so that it must be impotent 
for any national effort, "a Parliament," as Mr. Herbert 
Samuel says, "for the local affairs of Irishmen," there 
are other and more powerful agencies that no measure of 
"conciliation within the Empire" can permanently win 
to that system of world exploitation centred in London. 

"I would let the Irish have Home Rule," said recently 
Mr. Winston Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." 
But the last word came from Lord Morley, the "father 
of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said, in friendly, 
private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full 
savour of their own dunghill civilization." 

But the last word of all will come, not from Lord 
Morley or "Home Rule," but from the land and the 
myriad peoples whose ancient civilization, Lord Morley, 
like every precedent Satrap, has striven to bury under 



39 

the dunghill of British supremacy in India, and to hide 
the very outlines of the ancient body in the set designs 
of a new purpose. 

Civilization has her triumphs of destruction no less 
than of construction, as the submerged pillars of Philae 
attest. In India the task is to obliterate by construction. 

The draughtsman now succeeds the storming parties 
of the past and wipes out with rule and compass what 
even pillage had spared. The capital of British India is 
to be "the new Delhi," planned in Whitehall, but paid 
for in India — the apotheosis of dung. The new India 
will make short work of "the new Delhi." 

"An unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,"' of moral and 
spiritual separation sets between the imperial conception 
as nourished in Britain, and the growing hope of the great 
millions of mankind who make up the greatest realm of 
her Empire. 

Ireland might be bought or bribed, at any rate in this 
generation, to forfeit her national ideals and barter the 
aspiration that six centuries of contact with England have 
failed to kill; but the three hundred and fifty millions of 
Indian mankind can never be won, or bought, or bribed 
in the end. 

Even if Ireland forgot the deathless words of Grattan, 
delivered in the subordinate Parliament of 1780, those 
words will find a response in the hearts of men who never 
heard of Grattan. For the voice of the Irish patriot was, 
in truth, a world voice — a summons to every audience 
wherever men gather in quest of freedom. The prophesy 
Grattan uttered in the name of Ireland assuredly will be 
fulfilled, and that in the lifetime of many of us, in that 
greater Ireland England holds in the Eastern Seas by the 
very same title of raid, conquest and spoliation that has 
given her our own land. 



90 

Substitute "India" for "Ireland" and the Grattan of 
i 780 becomes the Indian patriot of to-day. 

"I never will be satisfied so long as the meanest cot- 
tager in Ireland has a link of the British chain clanking 
in his rags; he may be naked, he shall not be in irons; 
and I do see the time is at hand; the spirit is gone forth, 
the declaration is planted; and though great men should 
apostasize, yet the cause will live; and though the public 
speaker should die, yet the immortal lire shall outlast the 
organ which conveyed it, and the breath of liberty, like 
the word of the holy man will not die with the prophet, 
but survive him."* 

Were Ireland to accept the bribe now offered she would 
indeed justify the reproach of Wilfrid Blunt: but she 
Avould become something else than "a weapon of offence 
in England's hands against the freedom of the world else- 
where;"' she would share, and rightly share, the fate of 
the parasite growth that, having gripped her trunk so 
tightly, has by that aid reached the sunlight. The British 
Empire is no northern oak tree. It is a creeping, climb- 
ing plant that has fastened on the limbs of others and 
grown great from a sap not its own. If we seek an ana- 
logy for it in the vegetable and not in the animal world 
we must go to the forests of the tropics and not to the 
northern woodlands. In the great swamps at the mouth 
of the Amazon, the naturalist Bates describes a monstrous 
liana, the "Sipo Matador."' or Murdering Creeper, that 
far more fitly than the oak tree of the north typifies 
John Bull and the place he has won in the sunlight by 
the once strong limbs of Ireland. 

Speaking of the forests around Para, Bates says: — 
"In these tropical forests each plant and tree seems to 
be striving to outvie its fellows, struggling upwards to- 
wards light and air— branch and leaf and stem— regard- 
less of its neighbors. Parasitic plants are seen fastening 



9i 

with firm grip on others, making use of them with reck- 
less indifference as instruments for their own advancement. 
Live and let live is clearly not the maxim taught in these 
wildernesses. There is one land of parasitic tree very 
common near Para which exhibits this feature in a very 
prominent manner. It is called the "Sipo Matador," or 
Murderer Liana. It belongs to the fig order, and has 
been described and figured by von Martius in the At- 
las to Spix and Martius's Travels. I observed many 
specimens. The base of its stem would be unable to bear' the 
weight of the upper growth; it is obliged, therefore, to 
support itself on a tree of another species. In this it is 
not essentially different from other climbing trees and 
plants, but the way the Matador sets about it is peculiar 
and produces certainly a disagreeable impression. It 
springs up close to the tree on which it intends to fix 
itself, and the wood of its stem grows by spreading itself 
like a plastic mould over one side of the trunk of its 
supporter. It then puts forth, from each side, an arm- 
like branch, which grows rapidly, and looks as though 
a stream of sap were flowing and hardening as it went. 
This adheres closely to the trunk of the victim, and the 
two arms meet at the opposite side and blend together. 
These arms are put forth at somewhat regular intervals 
in mounting upwards, and the victim, when its strangle!- 
is full grown, becomes tightly clasped by a number of 
inflexible rings. These rings gradually grow larger as 
the Murderer flourishes, rearing its crown of foliage to 
the sky mingled with that of its neighbour, and in course 
of time they kill it by stopping the flow of its sap. The 
strange spectale then remains of the selfish parasite clasp- 
ing in its arms the lifeless and decaying body of its 
victim, which had been a help to its own growth. Its 
ends have been served — it has flowered and fruited, re- 
produced and disseminated its kind; and now when the 



92 

dead trunk moulders away its own end approaches; its .support 
is gone and itself also falls.''' 

The analogy is almost the most perfect in literature, 
and if we would not see it made perfect in history we 
must get rid of the parasite grip before we are quite 
strangled. If we would not share the coming darkness 
we must shake oft* the murderer's hold, before murderer 
and victim fall together. That fall is close at hand. A 
brave hand may yet cut the "Sipo Matador,'' and the 
slayer be slain before he has quite stifled his victim. 

If that hand be not a European one, then may it 
come, bronzed, keen and supple from the tropic calm! 
The birds of the forest are on the wing. 

Regions Caesar never knew, including Hibernia, have 
come, under the eagles, nay, the vultures, of imperial 
Britain. But the Lion's maw is full. 

At length the overgorged Beast of Prey, with all the 
diseases in his veins that overeating brings, finds that 
his claws are not so sharp as they were, that his belly- 
is much heavier when he tries to leap, and that it is now 
chiefly by his Voice he still scares his enemies. 

The Empire of England dates from Tudor times. 
Henry VIII was the first John Bull. With the conquered 
Irish and the wealth derived from their rich country 
England set out to lay low every free people that had a 
country worth invading and who, by reason of their non- 
imperial instincts, were not prepared to meet her on 
equal terms. India she overran by the same methods as 
had given her Ireland. 

Wholesale plunder, treachery and deceit met at her 
Council Board under a succession of Governors and 
Viceroys, whose policy was that of Captain Kidd, and 
whose anteroom of State led every native prince to the 
slippery plank. The thing became the most colossal 
success upon earth. No people were found able to with- 



93 

stand such a combination. How could peoples still nursed 
in the belief of some diviner will ruling men's minds 
resist such attack? 

For one brief space Napoleon reared his head ; and had 
he cast his vision to Ireland instead of to Egypt he would 
have found out the secret of the Pirate's Stronghold. But 
the fates willed otherwise; the time was not yet. He 
sailed for Alexandria, lured by a dream, instead of for 
Cork ; and the older Imperialists beat the new Imperialist 
and secured a fresh century of unprecedented triumph. 
The Pyramids looked down on Waterloo ; but the head- 
lands of Bantry Bay concealed the mastery, and the 
mystery, of the seas. 

With 1 8 i 5 was born the Era of Charles Peace, no less 
than of John Bull— on Sundays and Saint's days a Church- 
warden, who carried the plate ; on week days a burglar who 
lifted it. Truly, as John Mitchel said on his convict hulk, 
"On English felony the sun never sets.'" May it set in 1 9 1 5 ! 

From Napoleon's downfall to the battle of Colenso, the 
Empire founded by Henry VIII has swelled to monstrous 
size. Innumerable free peoples have bit the dust and died 
with plaintive cry to heaven. The wealth of London has 
increased a thousand fold, and the giant hotels and cara- 
vanserais have grown, at the millionaire's touch, to rival 
the palaces of the Caesars. 

"All's well with God's world" — and poet and plagia- 
rist, courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant— these now 
dally by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples 
of the earth, just as once the degenerate populace of im- 
perial Rome fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids. But 
the thing is near the end. The "secret of Empire" is no 
longer the sole possession of England. Other peoples are 
learning to think imperially. The Goths and the Visigoths 
of modem civilization are upon the horizon. Action must 
soon follow thought. London, like Rome, will have strange 



94 

guests. They will not pay their hotel bills. Their day is 
not yet, but it is at hand. "Home Rule" assemblies and 
Indian "Legislative Councils" may prolong the darkness: 
but the dawn is in the sky. And in the downfall of the 
Tudor Empire, both Ireland and India shall escape from the 
destruction and join again the free civilizations of the earth. 

The birds of the forest are on the wing. 

It is an Empire in these straits that turns to America, 
through Ireland, to save it. And the price it offers is- — 
war with Germany. France may serve for a time; but 
France, like Germany, is in Europe, and in the end it is all 
Europe and not only Germany England assails. Permanent 
confinement of the white races, as distinct from the Anglo- 
Saxon variety, can only be achieved by the active support 
and close alliance of the American people. These people 
are to-day. unhappily, republicans and freemen, and have 
no ill-will for Germany and a positive distaste for im- 
perialism. It is not really in their blood. That blood is 
mainly Irish and German, the blood of men not distin- 
guished in the past for successful piracy and addicted 
rather to the ways of peace. The wars that Germany has 
waged have been wars of defence, or wars to accomplish 
the unity of her people. Irish wars have been only against 
one enemy, and ending always in material disaster, they 
have conferred always amoral gain. Their memory uplifts 
the Irish heart: for no nation, no people can reproach Ire- 
land with having wronged them. She has injured no man. 

And now, to-day, it is the great free race of this com- 
mon origin of peace-loving peoples, filling another conti- 
nent, that is being appealed to by every agency of crafty 
diplomacy, in every garb but that of truth, to aid the 
enemy of both and the arch-disturber of the old world. 
The jailer of Ireland seeks Irish-American support to 
keep Ireland in prison; the intriguer against Germany 
would win German- American goodwill against its parent 



95 

stock. There can be no peace for mankind; no limit to 
the intrigues set on foot to assure Great Britain "the 
mastery of the seas." 

If ' ' America ' ' will but see things aright, as a good ' 'Anglo- 
Saxon" people should, she will take her place beside, nay, 
even a little in front of John Bull in the plunder of the 
earth. Were the "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" ever consum- 
mated it would be the biggest crime in human history. 
That alliance is meant by the chief party seeking it, to 
be a perpetual threat to the peoples of Europe, nay, to 
the whole of mankind outside the allied ranks. And, 
instead of bringing peace it must assuredly bring the 
most distracting and disastrous conflict that lias ever 
stained the world with blood. 

John Bull has now become the great variety artist, one, 
in truth, whose infinite variety detection cannot stale any 
more than Customs officers can arrest the artist's baggage. 

At one moment the "Shirt King," being prosecuted for 
the sale of cheap cottons as "Irish linen" in London; the 
next he lands the "Bloater King" in New York, offering 
small fish as something very like a whale. And the offer 
in both cases is made in the tongue of Shakespeare. 

That tongue has infinite uses: from China it sounds 
the " Call for prayer. " and lo, the Book of Dividend opens 
at the right text. Were Bull ever caught in the act, and 
put from the trade of international opium-dosing to that 
of picking oakum and the treadmill, we should hear him 
exclaim, as he went out of sight, "Behold me weaving the 
threads of democratic destiny as I climb the Golden Stair!" 

The roles are endless. In Ireland, the conversion of 
Irishmen into cattle; in England, the conversion of Irish 
cattle into men; in India and Egypt the suppression of 
the native Press ; in America the subsidizing of the non- 
native Press. The tongue of Shakespeare has infinite uses. 
He only poached deer — it would poach Dreadnoughts. The 



9 6 

emanations of Thames sewage are all over the world, and 
the sewers are running still. The penalty for pollution of 
the Thames is a high one ; but the prize for the pollution of 
the Mississipi is higher still: the fountains of the deep, 
the mastery of the great waters, these are the things John 
Bull seeks on the shores of the "Father of Waters. " 

The sunset of a fading Empire would turn those waters 
into blood. The British Empire was not founded in peace ; 
how, then, can it be kept by peace or ensured by peace 
treaties? It was born of pillage and bloodshed, and has 
been maintained by both; and it cannot now be secured 
by a common language any more than by a common 
Bible. The lands called the British Empire belong to 
many races, and it is only by the sword and not by the 
Book of Peace or any pact of peace that those races can 
be kept from the ownership of their own countries. 

The "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" means a compact to ensure 
slavery and beget war. The people who fought the greatest 
war in modern history to release slaves are not likely to 
begin the greatest war in all history to beget slaves. 

Let the truth be known in America that England wants 
to turn the great Republic of freemen into the imperial 
ally of the great Empire of bought men, and that day the 
"Anglo-Saxon Alliance'* gives place to the Declaration 
of Independence. 

The true alliance to aim at for all who love peace is 
the friendly Union of Germany, America and Ireland. These 
are the true United States of the world. 

Ireland, the link between Europe and America, must 
be freed by both. 

Denied to-day free intercourse with either, she yet 
forms in the great designs of Providence the natural bond 
to bring the old world and the new together. 

May 1 9 1 5 lay the foundations of this — the true Hundred 
Years of Peace ' 



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